A woman from New York lost a cherished piece of jewelry that had been in her family for almost a century while traveling during the holidays. Fortunately, a group of strangers banded together to assist her in locating it.
Diana Freedman recalled the devastating moment she realized her beloved grandmother’s necklace was no long hanging from her neck.
“I kept trying to re-track in my brain where it could possibly be, I was devastated,” Freedman said.
The woman’s grandfather crafted the necklace for his wife, who was a dancer invited to join the Rockettes nearly 200 years ago. As he became more prosperous, he adorned the pendant, symbolizing the couple’s love story and the American dream.
Reflecting on the necklace, Freedman remarked, “It’s a beautiful representation of the American dream intertwined with a love story. Despite humble beginnings as children of immigrants, my grandfather started with a simple piece for my grandmother. As he prospered, he added a heart mounting, and later, a diamond embellishment.”
Her grandmother never took it off until she bequeathed it to Freedman over 20 years ago.
“It’s almost like a piece of her, really, that everyone remembered her by, and the fact that she wanted to see me wear it with my own children,” Freedman said.
In turn, she never took it off, until that fateful December day after which a little sleuthing narrowed her focus to a JetBlue flight.
“A deputy at Palm Beach Airport that helped me zoom in to the video that they had on security camera,” Freedman said. “He said that the necklace was not on me when I was leaving the terminal. So I knew that there was a good chance it was on this airplane.”
She immediately posted an SOS on her local “Long Islands Amazing Moms” Facebook group. And as fate would have it, one of those 28,000 moms was a JetBlue executive.
“I work in operations. And so when I saw it, I immediately was like I can track that plane down, I know where that plane is right now,” said Penny Neferis, JetBlue’s head of business continuity.
The Jetblue teamwork took off with a chain reaction leading to JetBlue Stations Operator Tom Hungerman checking every single lost and found drawer at the Palm Beach International Airport.
“My God, it was amazing. It was amazing, and during the holidays, as you can imagine, with airport travel, it’s a stressful time not only for the customers but for the workers as well,” Hungerman said. “And so you don’t always get these opportunities to create that magic moment, that holiday miracle, if you will.”
And so 48 hours after it disappeared, Freedman was reunited with the heirloom.
“It was happy tears for a long time after that, and I still feel it right now, I feel so lucky and so blessed,” Freedman said.
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