An Alabama woman who lost three wedding bands during a recent visit to the Lodge and Spa at Callaway Gardens has recovered some of the missing jewelry from a pawn shop in LaGrange.
The owner of Express Pawn called Erin Ward on Aug. 2 to say that two of her rings had been sold there for $500 by two women, according to the LaGrange Daily News.
Ward of Thorsby, Alabama, had to pay $500 to get back her diamond engagement band and diamond wedding ring, the Daily News reported. Her ruby anniversary band, however, remains missing.
The pawn shop is nearly 20 miles north of the resort in Pine Mountain.
The owner of the pawn shop showed Ward surveillance footage of the women who walked in with the two rings, but Ward said she did not recognize them.
Ward was at the luxury resort with her family in mid-July, according to the Daily News.
After checking out, she returned home to Alabama, but soon realized her precious jewelry was missing. She and her husband immediately got back on the highway and made the more than two-hour drive back to Georgia.
But by that time Ward said hotel staff told her they had not seen nor heard anything about the missing rings.
Several days passed with little communication from the hotel manager.
Desperate to find her valuables, Ward went back to the lodge, where she posted several flyers and approached the cleaning staff with a $2,000 reward for the jewelry.
“All of those women that day ... said ‘we would never do that, and if we found them we wouldn’t even take your reward money,” Ward told the Daily News. “Just knowing for certain that someone took them and someone pawned them, I’m just aggravated.”
At the time, Pine Mountain Police Department officer Christopher Nance also checked a national database that tracks pawned jewelry, but did not immediately find a match.
Ward now says she is considering a lawsuit against the hotel, according to the Daily News.
“They did not follow protocol,” she told the newspaper. “They told Officer Nance that they were supposed to have a manager or someone on manager level check the hotel room before housekeeping, and they did not do that.”
