Passport lost in Boston returns to Irish woman via good Samaritan in Grafton
It’s a good thing that information doesn’t need a passport to travel the world.
A woman from Ireland visiting friends in Framingham was reunited with her lost passport Wednesday after relatives living in Ireland used social media to find that her passport had somehow traveled to the Grafton Police Department despite the woman having never been there.
Chloe Margaret O’Brien, 25, said she often kept her passport with her in a coat pocket but lost it after a night out at a bar in Boston.
On that evening, she had last seen the passport after she hung the coat on a coatrack.
At the end of the night, the coat came back on, but it wasn’t until the Uber driver had dropped her off at home that O'Brien realized that the passport was missing.
After checking with the Uber driver and calling the bar in Boston, the woman from Cork, a city in southern Ireland, said she gave up hope and resorted to having to order a new passport to get back home.
Sunday morning, O’Brien’s husband’s social media account was bombarded with messages from friends, family and strangers from Ireland who said that an Irish passport with her name on it had been turned in to the Grafton Police Department, according to a Facebook post by the department.
The post had almost 10,000 shares as of Friday afternoon, while a thread with a screenshot of the police department’s post appeared on Reddit about 24 hours later.
Sgt. Jimmy Crosby of the Grafton Police Department said a person named Seetharmr Chimangala had turned in the passport Sunday, saying to have found it in the area of Milford Road in Grafton.
Chimangala was unable to be reached at the phone number they had provided to the department.
Neither Crosby nor O’Brien have any ideas for how the passport traveled from her pocket to Milford Road in Grafton.
“Thank you so much for having such a great heart and saving my new year,” said O’Brien, referring to the person who returned her passport.
When she picked up the passport Wednesday at the department, O’Brien added that the passport had some damage and looked like it had been outdoors, although it was still viable for her to use Dec. 29, when she returns to Ireland with her family.
O’Brien was said to have been in the Framingham area for the past two and a half months, while she had also visited the country last year for about six weeks.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Passport lost in Boston returns to Irish woman via good Samaritan in Grafton
