For those of you following the comments, here’s how it all turned out with Terry, Brendan, the NYPD and the rings:
It started with a comment from Terry P. Marshall, who wrote: “This morning I found 3 wedding/engagement rings near the swings by the splash park. Left a note with my phone number but no call. Dropping rings at NYPD 1st Precinct by Franklin St Station Tribeca.”
A few hours later, Brendan replied: “Hi Terry! I am looking for these rings — have you dropped them off by the 1st Precinct just yet?”
And three hours after that, the NYPD’s communications office: “Hi Terry, we are looking for the rings, they never turned up at the 1st. Can you contact our office? 646 610-6700. thanks.”
In between the comments, I put Brendan and Terry in touch via email. Turns out Brendan’s nanny, Joyce Bermuda, had lost them while out playing with her young charge on Monday and had already traced her steps — even checking the drains at Pier 25 and Washington Market Park — but to no avail. She did the same rounds again before work on Tuesday morning; no luck. By then Terry, who was staying with her daughter and grandkids at her sister’s place in Tribeca, had found them at the water play area of Pier 25, waited around a while to see if someone came back for them, left a note at the park with her number, waited a night for someone to call her, and then took them to the 1st Precinct the next day before she left for home in Plymouth, Mass. In between there she googled “Tribeca lost and found” and the TC site popped up, so she left a comment. Brendan spotted it a little while later.
By Wednesday morning, officers had returned the rings to Joyce.
“I went from devastated to overjoyed to ‘woo hoo,'” said Joyce, whose husband had given her the three nesting rings as a birthday present last May. “I’m working as a nanny. Things like that are so valuable to me. Plus it was from my husband.”
She texted Terry to say thanks, who by then was headed back to Boston. And then Joyce put the rings in a safe.
“The captain told me, ‘That’s some good karma for you.’ He’s right. Not all people would do that.”