Craigslist Reunites Lucky Woman With Engagement Ring Lost off the Hawaiian Coast
Laura Mitrowski lost her diamond ring last Saturday while on vacation in Kauai.
— -- When Laura Mitrowski left her home in Massachusetts for her family’s vacation in Hawaii, she never expected to lose her engagement ring, while snorkeling in paradise.
But thanks to one good-hearted local man -- and a chance encounter on Craigslist -- the ring is now safely back on her finger after being lost in the ocean off Lawai Beach.
“I just can’t believe this all happened,” Mitrowski told ABC News of the shocking discovery. “I’ve been swimming tons of times and my rings have never fallen off. The fact we found it is unbelievable.”
As soon as Mitrowski got out of the water on Saturday, she immediately knew something didn’t feel right.
“We’ve been married 12 years. As soon as I got out of the water my hands felt funny,” she said. “I was sitting down in my chair and I’m like, ‘Oh no, it came off in the water,’ and my husband was still out in the water and I was waving to him crying hysterically on the beach.”
The savvy snorkeler took to Craigslist that same night to submit a post about her lost ring.
“A few people replied right away that they were going to go look for it, but Monday night I got an email from Mike that he thought he found it,” she said of Mike Smith, the man who found her ring. “He said he was going to post that he found the ring on Craigslist and then he saw my ad, and that’s when he replied to it.”
To ensure the ring was definitely Mitrowski’s, Smith asked her to describe the ring in more detail.
“I told him there was a crack in the band,” she recalled, which sealed the deal.
The two met on Tuesday morning to return the ring, and Mitrowski couldn’t be more relieved.
“He says it was so random,” she said of how Smith found the piece of jewelry. “He saw a shell that looked nice and he went to pick it up and my ring came out of the sand or something crazy.”