With her wedding ring back on her finger, an Anoka woman now wants to meet the teenager who found her lost jewel on a snow-covered trail and set in motion the unlikely reunification.
"I want to thank her," said Darnell Sue, whose family heirloom slipped off her finger in the mid-December cold as she walked along a Rum River trail. "There is a new ice cream shop that opened up in town, and I want to get her a gift card or something. I want to meet and thank her."
Sue, 45, a transplant from Seattle experiencing her first Minnesota winter, said she actually has the whole town to thank after a bar owner heard the sad story, put out the word on social media and had everybody looking for the missing gold ring that had once belonged to Sue's great-aunt.
Sue and her husband, Jason Lindahl, 30, who were married just last year, were with two other couples chatting and taking pictures on Dec. 16 as they walked near downtown Anoka. They stopped at Billy's for drinks before returning home. It wasn't until the next day Sue realized her ring had vanished.
She returned to Billy's hoping somebody had turned it in, but no luck. Bar owner Erin Justen offered Sue her metal detector, and reached out to her contacts on Facebook and Instagram asking them to help in the search. The post went viral.
"Something inside me told me to post it and see what happened," said Justen, who said she gets frequent requests for help finding lost things. "I have this platform at my fingertips and thought, I can reach out and see if we get lucky. It was a long shot."
For two weeks, Sue said she prayed every day to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, desperately hoping for the best — all while locals followed along on social media, looking for the ring and wondering if it would ever turn up.
"It was like a community," said Sue, who being new to town doesn't know many people in Anoka. "People knew me and I don't know them, but they wanted an update. There were like 800 likes and comments."
