FOLSOM, Calif. — It happens once a week every week in just about every neighborhood, but Wednesday's garbage run on Folsom's Kidder Way was a little different for Andria Saint-Evens. For her, it was heart-racing, stomach-sinking different.
Saint-Evens said she was cleaning her rings before her 19th wedding anniversary next month when she set them down. The diamond ring came from her great grandmother and is 100 years old.
"I went to put on my rings on and realized they weren't right where I normally leave them and then I ran upstairs but they weren't there," Saint-Evens told KTXL. "It was almost surreal. I just started crying."
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Saint-Evens tried to trash her trepidation by sending her son, Bryce, out to grab their bags out of the garbage, but the crews had already collected them.
Saint-Evens then called the city's solid waste department, which stopped the truck hauling her neighborhood's trash and started a fine sifting process through about 300 cans worth of what everyone near her had thrown away.
"Well at first I was a little skeptical," said Dennis Conger of Folsom Solid Waste. "But when we got out there and I saw Andria and how distraught she was. I thought we're gonna find this ring."
As unlikely as it seemed, after about 30 minutes of Saint-Evens, her husband and two city workers rummaging through refuse, they found it.
"I dug through and it wasn't there. And the third bag I was on my last paper towel -- because I knew I set it on a paper towel -- and I heard this clink and both of my rings fell out of the paper towel," said Saint-Evens.
"It just made me feel so good that they were treating me like I was their daughter," Saint-Evens said of the garbage truck's crew. "If they hadn't been willing to dump it out and search with me. It would be gone and I would have lost a piece of my family history that was so important."