If you ever happen to own a $10,000 ring, make sure to keep it on your finger. But if you have to stick it in your wallet, don’t leave the wallet on a bench outside of a bar. This story is actually about one person that will make you lose your faith in humanity, and another person that will totally restore that faith. Jimmy Gilleece, who is from North Carolina, got a message from a woman in New Mexico. She told him about a ring that she had lost, that was very important to her, and it was an expensive ring too. She had visited Gilleece’s bar called Jimmy’s at Red Dogs, and that’s where she believed the ring went missing. That’s when Jimmy sprang into action to help find it.Gilleece also happens to be a hero, at least, that’s what one woman would end up calling him after he did the impossible and helped her figure out what had happened to her missing ring and wallet.
And why wouldn’t it be? Not only can you order alcohol, but you can also listen to some awesome music. Gilleece often has bands playing at the bar. This attracts a decent crowd which keeps the place running.
If you happen to find yourself sitting at Jimmy’s, you might get the chance to pet the bar’s dog. His name is Kruzer, and he’s one cool dude. Just look at how awesome he looks chilling on the counter! He’s obviously not shy!
Unfortunately, a few weeks earlier, Gilleece got a message from a person from New Mexico. She told him that she had lost her wallet while at his bar, and to make things worse, the wallet had a ring worth $10,000 in it.
He decided to look through the footage from the security cameras and that’s when he noticed that the New Mexico woman had left the wallet on a bench. Then a young man had taken the wallet and fled the scene.
He believed that posting the image of the crook on social media might allow locals to help the police figure out who the thief was. Now this was a long shot because the man was wearing a hoodie, but Gilleece’s efforts paid off.
His name was Rivers Prather and he was just 17 years old. The teen had already taken a wrong turn in life. But don’t judge the thief too harshly. Once you hear the story behind Prather’s motives you’ll see things a little different.
Praher had a falling out with his mother, and had been sleeping on the streets ever since. The teen was hungry, but he didn’t have any money to buy himself food or even a drink. So when he found the wallet, he grabbed the cash, and then he threw the wallet away into the ocean, where it was presumably lost for good.
Instead of just telling the New Mexico woman that her ring and wallet were swimming with the fish, he hired divers and organized the search. The team scoured the water looking for a wallet in the murky waters of the sea, which was not an easy mission.
Gilleece knew that Prather had stolen the money, but he was pretty confident that he hadn’t taken the ring, so he was hoping that once the wallet was found, the ring would still be inside. Now that the wallet had been recovered, it was just a matter of looking for the ring.
The ring had survived its underwater journey, and Jimmy was elated to hear it was finally recovered. Now it was just a matter of reaching out to the woman from New Mexico and giving her the good news. Boy was she going to be excited!
The bar owner proved that he had a heart of gold. Aside from helping the New Mexico woman, he realized that there was another person that desperately needed his help, and that was the young thief, Rivers Prather. “He was living in the woods, and this is when it was 30 degrees outside, and he hadn’t eaten in two days,” he told CBS news.
Gilleece and his family welcomed the young man and made him a part of their family. “I could tell he wasn’t a criminal. He was just somebody who needed a little help,” he told CBS news. Gilleece went above and beyond and also offered to help the boy to get a job so he wouldn’t have to steal from anyone ever again.
Gilleece is an amazing human being, who not only reunited a woman with her expensive ring, but also made a wayward teen the latest addition to his family’s nest. Who knew that a story that was so heartbreaking could give everyone involved the happy ending they deserved?
