A woman whose wedding ring was found in the rubble after her home was destroyed in the California fires shared a story of hope.
“It was a needle in a haystack, right? It was a ring in a roof, a ceiling, furniture, walls and then my ring,” Victoria DeSantis told “Good Morning America” in an interview on Monday. “It made my heart happy, just for a moment, knowing I’ve lost everything. I left with two pairs of jeans and two sweaters and everything, all of my childhood memories, all of my children’s childhood memories, everything is gone. There’s not one thing saved, but I have my ring.”
DeSantis had just seconds to evacuate her Altadena home when the Eaton Fire broke out last week. With dry conditions worsened by strong winds at the time, she said she had been applying lotion constantly, causing her rings to slip off.
Deciding she didn’t want to search for them in the dark, she left them by the front door next to her keys. At 3:45 a.m., the alarms went off, and she had to evacuate.
Her husband and son were out of town, so she fled with her daughter and dog, leaving behind her wedding and engagement rings. In the chaos, she said nothing else mattered.
“As long as I got my daughter and my dog safely in the car and away from this disaster,” she explained. “And we saw embers flying through the air. We saw patches of grass on the street on fire, a house on fire. We were like, ‘This is not good. This is definitely not good.’”
She said when she told her husband she had forgotten the rings, he then reassured her, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you another one. It’s okay.”
When she returned, her home of 20 years had been reduced to debris.
As she sifted through the wreckage, she found her melted engagement ring, but she assumed her wedding band had been lost to the flames as well.
However, a firefighter searching through the wreckage with her uncovered the wedding band, miraculously untouched by the fire.
“You hold out hope, right?” DeSantis said. “As you’re driving around, you see that one house that’s okay, and that one house that’s okay, and you’re like, ‘come on, blue house. You could do it. You’re tough.’ But my entire block is gone. And we found this, like a melted platinum thing. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s my ring.’ I’m just so happy I found it.”
She later sent a picture of the ring to her husband who jokingly replied, “Now you’re definitely stuck with me. It’s like you thought you were gonna get out of this with no ring. He’s like, ‘No, you’re definitely stuck with me.’”
She continued, “We’re all like, trying to find humor in this. You know, it’s just those light moments that you have to have because behind you is literally a house on fire. We’re safe. We’re still here. Nothing else mattered. We’re together. Everything else is stuff. We’re okay.”
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