Hotel goes above and beyond to recover guest’s family heirloom
Taryn Thompson was astonished and grateful when strangers helped find her lost family heirloom. It was a special ring that her grandmother Louise Thompson left her after she passed away in 2007. As reported by WLEX 18 News, the western Kentucky student was attending a wedding in Lexington when she stopped into the Gratz Park Inn to freshen up.
Taryn realized later that at some point when she was at the inn, she misplaced the sentimental memento saying, “Sunday morning I woke up and nowhere to be found.” So she immediately called the hotel hoping that somehow they could help her. Taryn spoke with Veronica Saylor who was empathetic to her plight, “For her first thing she said, it was her grandmother’s ring. I’ve only got one grandmother left alive, and my mother’s already gone, so I know what it’s like to have sentimental things.”
Veronica enlisted help at the hotel explaining, “In the search we checked the bathrooms, the sinks. We took the sinks apart.” But when the heirloom failed to appear in the sink traps, they thought there was only one other place that the ring could possibly be: the trash in the dumpsters. Dedicated employee Carlos Justo Martinoz went to work and painstakingly searched the Gratz Park Inn dumpsters for Taryn’s ring. A translator explained what Carlos was thinking, “Then he got worried and then he tried, he tried to do his best to look for the ring and tried to find it and make the lady very happy.” The search was fruitful and Carlos emerged with the lost ring. Taryn got the news and gratefully said, “I just could not believe it. I was absolutely shocked…I think that if more people were willing to go that extra mile and work that hard then the world would be a much better place.”
Recently, several other lost rings were found by good samaritans that decided to search out their rightful owners. KUSA 9 News reported that a Tennessee high school state championship ring from 2006 was found in furniture at a Boulder, Colorado Goodwill store. Paul Henry discovered the jewelry and said, "It was stuck at first, but when I got it opened I saw this silver ring. It was so big I thought it was fake, but I kept looking at it and realized it was real." He turned it over to the Goodwill store manager and they were able to track down the owner who lives in Boulder.
A mom in Merritt Island, Florida was inspecting her son's Halloween candy when she found a woman's gold ring amongst the candy bars. WKMG Local 6, reported that the mom, Jacqui Ricci, is on a mission to find the ring's owner telling the station, "I wear my jewelry all the time and I would be devastated if I lost any of it."
