Rings lost during Mardi Gras parade found six years later

Oct. 25 (UPI) -- A former high school football star who lost two championship rings during a Mardi Gras parade was reunited with his lost items when they were found by a man using a metal detector six years later.

Higel Harris said he was riding on a Mardi Grad parade float in downtown Mobile, Ala., when his 1990 and 1992 championship rings from Mattie T. Blount High School fell from his finger.

"After I got home, after the parades and stuff, I started looking everywhere and could never find them and I just had never found them," Harris told WALA-TV. "For me the hard work that I put in for them, they meant a lot to me."

Harris received a call recently from Jamie Malone, a stranger who said he had found some of Harris' lost property.

"I was feeling in my pockets like did I lose my wallet? So I'm like I haven't lost anything so I'm like why would they be calling me?" Harris recalled.

Malone turned out to have found Harris' rings while using his metal detector in downtown Mobile.

"I was sitting at home and decided I wanted to do a little metal detecting and so I got a signal on the ground and bent down, dug it up, and there was one ring," Malone said. "And dug a little deeper and there was a second ring."

Harris said he was overjoyed to get his rings back.

"It was like I won them again. It was like I won them again and he was presenting them to me to wear them," Harris said.

A West Virginia man who lost his class ring just two months after graduating in 1979 had his own long-lost property returned to him in August.

Phillip Schwartz said he was giving a metal detector demonstration recently in the fields across the street from Ravenswood High School in Jackson County when he came across the gold ring.

The ring's owner was identified as former student Mark Miller, who said he had lost the ring just two months after he graduated from the school.