'It was like truly a miracle': Brooklyn man digs through 20,000 pounds of garbage to find a family heirloom ring his wife accidentally trashed

To avoid damaging the ring while washing the dishes on July 26, Susanna took it off and left it on the countertop, which she wiped down with a towel, accidentally sliding the family heirloom, along with another ring and some scraps of food, into the garbage bin. She didn’t realize, however, until the next day — after the trash had already been taken out.

Victor told The Washington Post that he figured his family heirloom was gone and had planned to ask a jeweler to make a copy.

“There’s no way that it survived,” he said. Still, he wasn’t willing to give up without a fight.

Finding a needle in a haystack

The following morning, Victor waited outside of his Brooklyn apartment building for Javier Gomez, a 55-year-old New York City sanitation worker, to ask for permission to access the complex’s trash area. Gomez was able to arrange a time a few days later — on July 29 — for Victor to visit a nearby waste transfer station that had accumulated about 20,000 pounds of garbage spanning 100 feet from both Victor’s building and another building.

Gomez, who told the Washington Post that he “felt bad for the guy,” helped Victor look for the “needle in a haystack,” knowing that “there was no way he was going to find it by himself.”

Together, they attempted to track down a white trash bag with an orange drawstring that Susanna had taken out — one that also contained potato peels and dog pee pads from Victor’s French bulldog — in a heap of dirty diapers, rotting food and more.

About an hour into the search and about a quarter of the way through the mountain of trash, Gomez spotted the bag — and the platinum ring inside.

“It was like truly a miracle,” Victor told the Washington Post.

He told Gomez to expect an invitation to his son’s future wedding, where he intends to display a photograph of Gomez and him finding the family heirloom.

What to do if you mistakenly trash something valuable

Unfortunately, Victor’s story is not an isolated one. People can mistakenly throw out or lose valuable items at any time.

Just recently, a lottery player threw away a ticket that was worth €1 million, more than $1.1 million, at a shop in Bitonto, in Italy’s Apulia region. He got in touch with the garbage truck that had collected the trash containing the ticket and was taken to a site where waste workers searched for — and somehow found — the “small piece of paper hidden in a mountain of waste.”

Another man in Seville, Spain, picked up a painting that a family had accidentally left outside their house; the man mistook the painting for curbside garbage, and he grabbed it because he liked the frame. The painting, which the family never intended to throw away, ended up being worth $170,000.

There are also tons of stories of older Americans hiding inheritances around their homes — under mattresses, between the pages of books and even in aluminum foil in the freezer — for their family members to find. Sometimes, that money ends up hidden forever or accidentally binned when people clean out their deceased loved ones’ homes.

If you accidentally toss something valuable, like a family heirloom, in the trash, there are some steps you can take to try to get it back — and hope that luck is on your side, as it was for Victor.