Woman lost her ring's diamond at baggage claim — got an ending she wasn’t expecting at all
Sometimes people get much more than they were expecting. Something similar happened with a woman who had lost her ring's diamond at baggage claim. The woman, April Schmidt, had returned from a work trip and collected her luggage and was driving home with her husband when she noticed that her ring's diamond was missing. She panicked at that moment and was sure that she was not going to find it again. But then the airport workers stepped in to help her in a marvelous way, per ABC News.
Schmidt had picked up her bag from the carousel and hadn't realized that she was missing a diamond until she was 30 minutes into her drive home. "I panicked and my heart sank. I truly didn’t think I was ever going to see it again," the Pittsburgh woman expressed, per Good News Network. She returned to the airport and decided to look everywhere she had been in hopes of finding her lost diamond. But unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found. She alerted an airport staff member, who informed the staff about what had happened. The maintenance team was called and they looked inside the carousel carefully in hopes of finding the lost diamond.
Tom Riordan, a stationary engineer at the airport, shared that he was determined to find the diamond, along with five other staff members and looked for it on their hands and knees inside a complicated system of belts and motors inside the carousel. They searched for around 90 minutes and couldn't find it. Schmidt was upset and decided to go back home, but Riordan assured her that they would keep looking for the diamond in between incoming flights. Eventually, Sean Dempsey, a PIT stationary engineer, ended up finding the diamond in the carousel. "I was just crawling with a flashlight and we had paint sticks to scrape all the dirt away. The diamond caught a little bit of light and I found it," Dempsey recounted.
They called the woman and informed her that her diamond had been found. As she was not expecting anything, she was in complete shock. "There were so many ways this story could have ended, but these guys were committed to helping me. I travel a lot and I go to a lot of airports," Schmidt explained. "To have this experience here and to be treated like an important person—those staffers were so concerned about my happiness and doing the right thing for me. I was not just a random passenger. They went out of their way to take care of me." Riordan was glad that they were able to help a passenger. "That’s all we need. You can go to any employee here and they’d all do the same."
Many people appreciated the effort the staff made to find the diamond in the comments section of ABC's YouTube video. @cristinagusatu6213 wrote, "Not going to wear diamond rings or jewelry when traveling because once I had a beautiful sapphire necklace. I lost it and never found it. It belonged to my grandmother." @amazingadventure123 commented, "Now that’s going above and beyond! Good job, American Airlines, good…no…GREAT JOB!" @ntokostalin remarked, "We still have some good guys in this world."