If you’ve ever lost something of great sentimental value, then you understand the sense of rising panic that sets in with each passing minute that goes by while it remains out of your possession; like a storm cloud suddenly approaching that threatens to swallow you whole.

Seekonk resident Ethan Moore experienced that precise feeling when he reached the shelter of a dugout at Pierce Field — where he had rushed in a frenzy to find his friends on July 3 as the now infamous, unexpectedly fierce storm began to dump torrents of wind-charged water on the city’s doomed fireworks show.

But although he had found both his friends and shelter from the deluge, he quickly discovered he had lost something too — something priceless.

“It was my stepfather’s ring. He passed away in 2020, and it was one of the only things he left to me,” Moore said. “I lost it when I hopped a fence to get to a dugout, and I didn’t realize it because I was getting slammed in the face with water. I went back out in the storm right after to try and find it, but I couldn’t.”

Moore gathered friends after the storm had let up to try again, but came up empty. Friends and family members helped scour every inch of the field on Independence Day as well, but the holiday came and went without any good news of the ring being found.

That’s when Ethan’s mother, Jennifer, took to social media, hoping for a small miracle.

“I put a Facebook post out there on every single page I could think of,” Jennifer, a former East Providence resident, said. “I never thought we would have the outpouring of support that we did to have people give up their time to go look. It was just amazing.”

Jennifer said multiple people responded to the posts and helped look on July 5, including another person with a metal detector, but nobody was able to find the gold ring.

Fate decided that Rumford native and resident Gene Silva would be the one to ultimately hit pay dirt.

“There was one spot he said he jumped the fence during the pouring rain,” Silva said. Ethan told Silva that he had a gut feeling that this must have been the spot where the ring came off while he was scrambling over the tall fence.

“He found a ring-like object, and he kind of jumped up, but it was just an aluminum ring,” Ethan recalled. “The next spot came up as a gold object.”

“It lit up like a manhole cover,” recalled Silva. “I handed it to him and everybody was just quiet. I called out to his mother, they came running over and everybody was hugging each other. It was great.”

Ethan and Jennifer both said they offered Gene a reward for finding the ring, but he refused.

“He just said the expression on my son’s face was more than enough of a reward,” Jennifer said. “We all started crying, and Gene was like, ‘Stop, you’re going to make me cry!’”

Ethan said that he had only taken off the ring to shower and swim since he received it in 2020 at the time of his stepfather’s passing.

“It meant so much,” he said of Gene’s effort. “I can’t thank Gene enough. He really helped us out and put my mind at ease and I’m glad he was there.”

Not his first recovered ring, either
Silva shared that he has been metal detecting for over 25 years, beginning when he bought his first detector in 1998. In his hunting throughout the region, he’s found hundreds of silver and gold coins, an 1806 quarter while scanning Crescent Park Beach, and a gold pocket watch winder from an 1892 Brown University graduate.

But unbelievably, one of the more memorable finds he shared was actually of another gold ring — one that had been lost by its owner around 42 years prior to his uncovering it from the banks of Blueberry Hill near the Henderson Bridge.

“I got a gold signal at 10 inches and found a class ring,” he said. “It was kind of muddy and sandy so I swished it around in the water and it said ‘East Providence High School Class of 1978’. That’s the year I graduated.”

It turned out to be the ring belonging to a classmate who was also a nearby neighbor of Silva’s. She still lived in the same house, and said she had lost it two weeks after they graduated.