Wednesday, December 25th 2019, 8:35 pm
This Christmas a Sapulpa police officer will be hand-delivering what may be the greatest gift a daughter could receive.
It's something that belonged to a man who died years ago, and is treasured by his family.
Sapulpa Police Officer Cady Byrnes was recently contacted about a missing wallet. Every picture, every card, was a clue about its owner.
"It kinda hit me,” Byrnes said.
The clues that hit Officer Byrnes will lead to a special Christmas delivery 257 miles away to a little town in Kansas.
"This thing's bounced around to who knows where - and has made it all the way to Sapulpa, Oklahoma,” Byrnes said.
Officer Byrnes did a little detective work to find the owner. Turns out, the wallet once belonged Fredric Sherrell. His daughter, Marina Hemsath, held it close after he died almost eight years ago.
"I always carried one of his wallets with me whenever I traveled,” Hemsath said.
The wallet wound up at a liquidation store in Sapulpa after Hemsath accidentally left it in a makeup bag that she returned to Amazon in the summer.
Someone bought the bag, found the wallet inside and returned it to the store.
That's when the work began for Byrnes.
"I dug a little bit deeper into this wallet and I found a little piece of paper that said “Kevin and Heather, home and cell” and it had two numbers on it,” Byrnes said.
She hit a roadblock there, but an insurance card led her to Fredric’s daughter. Then, she said she somehow found Marina’s number online.
"I could just hear her sobbing over the phone,” Byrnes said.
The two finally connected.
"It's something that means so much to me, and to anybody else it would have just been a wallet,” Hemsath said.
"But the best part of the story is, I get to see the end result of this because she actually lives in Basehor, Kansas, which is only 20 minutes away from my mother-in-law's house,” Byrnes said.
Since they are celebrating Christmas so close, Officer Byrnes and Marina plan to meet in person Saturday, when Byrnes will return the precious gift that money could never buy.
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