A U.S. Army veteran in Irvine, California, received a special gift from two men after his unique wedding ring went missing in June 2019.
When 89-year-old David Eaton married the love of his life in 1987, he had a local jeweler named Gabriela Hebin create several custom pieces for him and his wife, Babette, according to ABC 7.
One of those pieces was Eaton’s gold wedding ring, shaped to look like a Bavarian castle with a diamond in its tower.
Ever since his wife’s passing 13 years ago, Eaton had never removed it.
Sadly, after losing a significant amount of weight due to cancer treatments, he realized it had slipped from his finger one day while running errands, the Irvine Police Department wrote on Facebook Wednesday.
When David married his wife in 1987, he commissioned several custom jewelry pieces from Gabriela Hebin, a local jeweler…
Posted by Irvine Police Department on Wednesday, February 12, 2020
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He retraced his steps and left his information with the businesses he visited, hoping someone would find it and turn it in. When that did not happen, he refused to give up. He called several local police agencies asking for help locating the woman who created his ring, and eventually he called the Irvine Police Department.
When Officer Brian Smith heard about Eaton’s lost ring, he searched the internet and found Hebin.
She had moved to Florida, but remembered the veteran when the policeman relayed the story and said she still had the ring’s original mold.
Although Hebin was no longer a jeweler, she gave the mold to Officer Smith so he could have it re-created by Harry Mardirossian of MacTavish Jewelers in Irvine.
February 4, Eaton met the policeman at the shop carrying a picture book of castles to give the jeweler for reference, not knowing it had already been done.
When Mardirossian asked him, “Did your ring look something like this?” and showed him the gold wedding band, Eaton was shocked.
“It looks like the same ring,” he said, adding, “I had very little to say. I was totally speechless that he had my ring.”
“This is the best thing I have ever done in all my years of service,” Officer Smith commented.
Now, Eaton and Mardirossian will work together to choose a stone for the castle’s tower.
“When you marry someone and you have a house, they turn on the light for you so you know where home is,” Eaton said of the diamond.
“I put that stone in the castle’s window to shine like a light so that I can always find my way home,” he concluded.
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