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Being Neighborly | Shuttle driver found her most precious ring

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Gig Harbor resident Karen Fejta is thankful for the kindness of a shuttle bus driver who helped to save the special memories of a recent trip to the UK. Those memories were nearly ruined when she lost a ring that held sentimental value.

On a previous trip to Ireland with her daughter in 2013, Fejta bought a ring that symbolizes her Irish heritage. It became so special to her that it was part of her identity.  She wore it every day since the day she purchased the band with the Celtic knot design. When she put it on each day, she thought of the special moments she and her daughter shared on that trip, and everything the ring meant to her.

Fejta traveled to the UK for a month-long stay in July. She spent the month with friends and family seeing the sights and having a great time.

Lost ring

Upon her return, she took the Bremerton Kitsap Airporter shuttle from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to The Inn at Gig Harbor, and from there she took an Uber home.

A ring that represents her Irish heritage has sentimental meaning for Gig Harbor resident Karen Fejta. She lost the ring on a Bremerton Kitsap Airporter shuttle bus in July, and driver Mike Colombo searched until he found it. Photo courtesy of Karen Fejta

When she took her rings off after arriving home, her favorite was missing.

“I was so tired, because I had been up for 24 hours, Fejta said. “I thought, ‘maybe I already took it off.’ ”

She searched her house and called her Uber driver, but no luck.

The last time she remembered having the ring was on the airplane, so she filled out a lost item form with Delta. She still wondered if it was somewhere in her house, so she searched again, thinking maybe it fell behind something. She didn’t find it.

A precious possession

Her sadness overshadowed the month-long vacation that she’d just taken, and Fejta said she began to regret even going. She said she would have traded the trip to have the ring back. That’s how much the ring means to her.

“I was so upset, and kept thinking about it, so on Tuesday I got up and remembered that I didn’t check with the Airporter. I thought there’s no way it fell off, but what the heck, I’d call.”

Expecting superficial concern that may calm her but would go nowhere, Fejta was surprised when the dispatcher told her that they would search the bus with a flashlight and look in every corner of the shuttle.

Dispatcher Liz Graham said that she took Fejta’s call. She determined that Mike Colombo drove Fejta’s shuttle on July 21. He has been with the company for about 8 years, Graham said. Graham notified Colombo, who was on his last stop for the day on Tuesday, July 22.

Mike Columbo, a Bremerton Kitsap Airporter shuttle driver. Photo courtesy Mike Columbo

“I even told the dispatcher that I didn’t know that I lost it there, but I was just trying to retrace my steps,” Fejta said. “I hung up the phone thinking, ‘I won’t hear from them again.’”

To the rescue

Fejta was surprised when her phone rang within an hour.

“I was on my way somewhere, and answered the call, and when I described the ring to her, she said the guy really got down on his hands and knees and looked,” Fejta said.

Colombo not only looked in the nooks and crannies of the corners of the floor of the bus, he went through each seat crevice of the 24-passenger shuttle bus. He found Fejta’s ring stuck between two seats.

Fejta said she was so distraught about losing the ring that she couldn’t stop thinking about it, and felt so sad that she had lost it.

“This one thing meant so much to me, when they found it it was a huge sigh of relief,” she said. “It’s not expensive, but it had meaning to me.”

She said that she is so thankful that Colombo was willing to search for it. The ring had been stuck between the seats for two days as passengers rode to and from the airport.

“It would be easy for them to do absolutely nothing, except make me feel better by taking my phone number,” Fejta said. “The fact that he actually looked for it was amazing.”