Lost — and found.
Roger Stevens is being hailed as a hero by John Sauvageau and his now-fiancé Ashley after he found their lost engagement ring in Stanley Park.
The couple was visiting Vancouver from Edmonton last week, and Sauvageau was planning to pop the question. However, when it came to the crucial moment, he realized he had lost the ring.
“I started thumbing in my pocket and I couldn’t feel the ring anymore,” Sauvageau said.
“And this is kind of the moment where I start to panic.”
Stevens says he found the couple’s lost-and-found post online and then made it his mission to find the ring — a task similar to looking for a needle in a haystack in a park that covers 1,000 acres.
Stevens scoured the entire area with his metal detector until he got the signal — he found it.
“So I did the whole park,” Stevens said. “And I get up between these two trees here and the ring is right in the middle. Metal detector beeped, and that was it, I looked down and there’s the ring right on top. I knew it was theirs straight away.”
Sauvageau and his fiancé were in disbelief when they heard Stevens had found the ring.
“At first, I thought maybe someone was just messing with me or trying to scam me,” Sauvageau said.
“But then he sent a picture and it was, in fact, the ring. It took me a while to process it.”
Before the ring was found, Sauvageau was offered a new ring from a jeweller in Vancouver who caught wind of the story, but by that time, he had already bought a replacement ring.
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The original ring is now on its way to Edmonton, all parties praying it won’t get lost in the mail.
“Both Ashley and I really appreciate him going out of his way to look for us and not even ask or want any reward or payment for it, too,” Sauvageau said.
“He just did this out of the kindness of his heart.”
Stevens says he just wanted to help.
“It’s easy for me to make someone happy doing something I love to do,” he said.
“You do have that eureka moment. It’s like ‘yes!’ This is really what the goal is, and always the goal is to get the item back to the owner.”
He adds it didn’t even take him that long to find it.
“I got up like 6:30 in the morning. I said to my wife, ‘That’s it, I’m going to go and find this ring,’” he said.
“And 7:30 I was back in bed. Found the ring.”