Burton hot air balloon couple not alone in losing jewelry

CLEVELAND -- The Geauga County couple who made national headlines when their engagement ring fell from a hot-air balloon are not alone in losing jewelry in unusual ways.

When the story of James Ng and Sonya Bostic came to the attention of the Jewelers Mutual Insurance organization, they did some checking into ways other people reported losing their jewelry.

Original story on wkyc.com

Ng and Bostic were lucky in that James Ng's seven day search for the dropped ring was successful, but many people never see their lost jewelry again.

Over the past five years, Jewelers Mutual Insurance says more rings are lost by leaving them or losing them in a public restroom than for any other reason. Fully 12 percent of rings were reported lost in that manner.

Ten percent of jewelry owners said they weren't sure how or where their items were lost, while 8 percent reported losing them somehow while on vacation.

Four percent of people whose rings were insured say they "chipped a stone" according to Jewelers Mutual, and 4 percent say they accidentally threw their ring into the garbage.

Don Basch, of Don Basch Jewelers in Macedonia says people have told him some unusual storie about how they lost their rings.

"How about the woman who waded out into the ocean, and was afraid she'd lose her rings?" Basch tells WKYC. 

"So she took them off while standing in the water and handed them to her grandchildren."

Basch recalls another young man whose engagement ring disappeared while he was on the dance floor at a local club. He had just been showing it off to some friends and was planning to propose to his girlfriend.

Carol Lonczak felt her bracelet slipping away while she was on a boat at the Cedar Point Marina. Before her husband Tim could prevent it from sliding into the water, "it was gone," Carol remembers.

But she sent a scuba diver in after it.

"The scuba diver found a pair of sunglasses of mine that had gone down like two years before that, so we had hope that if he could find the sunglasses he could find the tennis bracelet, but no luck," Carol says.

Basch keeps two religious statues on his workbench at his store on East Aurora Road in Macedonia. One is of St. Joseph the Worker, the other is St. Anthony, patron of lost items.

"Just to be safe," says Don.  "Or as we prefer to say here, things that are just permanently, temporarily misplaced."

Other stories customers have told him include the woman who owned a custom ring only three weeks before showing it off to friends at a party in her home.

Naturally, she dropped the ring, which hit the floor with a "ping."

"Everybody hears it hit the floor and nobody can find this ring," says Basch, who remembers "weeks of looking for this ring." The ring was given up for lost and an insurance claim was filed, and then, the miracle.

"Months later she has the kitchen remodeled and the ring's actually balanced on the top of the baseboard just under the overhang of the cabinet," is how Basch remembers the story. "It must have been like a basketball spinning on your finger and it came to rest up there."

The woman found a buyer for the ring, which now had a duplicate, and donated the money to charity.