A woman in California found a pair of sparkling earrings on a beach while helping her friend find valuables that were washed away during the Montecito floods and mudslides. When she returned them to the owner, she learned of some tragic news.
In January, Erin Doherty, of Santa Barbara, found a silk satchel while walking by Butterfly Beach in Montecito. “It was mud soaked and I opened it up and inside there were a pair of earrings, gorgeous blue earrings,” she told KEYT
She decided to post the finding on her Facebook page to search for the owner.
Her post was shared more than 10,000 times and reached the owner’s daughter, Kelly Mitchell Weimer.
“They were her beautiful mothers [sic]. Both her parents and their little dog GiGi tragically perished in the debris flow. It’s believed the majority of their worldly belongings were spread down olive mill road to the beach and beyond…” Doherty wrote on a post to the Facebook group Montecito Disaster Lost & Found.
“She didn’t have anything left from her parents’ home,” she said.
The finding inspired Doherty to set up the Facebook group for anyone to post anything that they had found in the aftermath of the mudslide, or of lost items people were missing.
“At this point, we have a 90 percent success rate returning items,” she said. “The people we are giving the items back to are so unbelievably grateful to have one thing. We are looking for the possible in an impossible situation.”
But it was not an easy task for Doherty and the volunteers, dubbed Mud Angels, to dig through the mud that was around 3 feet thick.
“You can’t be afraid of getting dirty,” she told KTLA. “The mud smells, it has got stuff packed into it. The mud is starting to harden and the odds of finding photographs are going to be less and less. The photographs we are finding are the most valuable things that we are returning to people. Everything is at the mercy of this mud.”
For items that aren’t claimed by their owners, they’d be turned over to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.
“Montecito Lost and Found has been extremely helpful in connecting us with property owners and assisting residents in contacting the Sheriff’s Office to arrange an appointment with our property officer to retrieve their found property,” said Sgt. John Maxwell from the sheriff’s office.
Doherty and the volunteers are not just looking for lost items; they’re all actually cleaning up the debris and garbage as well.