Peekskill man's lost wedding ring found in rental car

Peekskill man's lost wedding ring found in rental car

PEEKSKILL ?- When Frances Medina-Torres learned that her husband had inadvertently left his $2,000 wedding band in a rental car, she thought it was gone for good.

Luckily for the newlywed couple, she was wrong.

Alberto Torres, who rented the car on Thursday while his was being repaired, said he took off the thick gold band with three diamonds so he could squeeze his hand between the driver's seat and console of the rental car to retrieve some letters that had fallen.

When he turned in the rental, the ring was left behind. Torres, a Peekskill resident, said it wasn't until after a shower at the gym that night that he realized it was missing and called his wife.

Medina-Torres said she wasn't as much concerned about the cost of the ring as she was about the sentimental value attached to it. She and Torres exchanged rings when they were married in December.

"We were very nervous about it because, most of the time, you don't get those kinds of things back," said Medina-Torres, 46.

By the time they discovered the ring was missing, the rental car company was closed. So Medina-Torres got up early yesterday and got to the Enterprise Rent-A-Car branch in Cortlandt about 15 minutes before it opened to see if it had been found.

Brandon Jackson, an Enterprise employee who cleans out the cars, had already spotted it under one of the car seats on Thursday night and taken it to the office for safekeeping.

"He said, 'I found this in the car outside, it looks like it might be valuable,' " said Chris Hall, an assistant manager at Enterprise.

Customers often leave stuff behind in the rental cars: compact discs, garage door openers or an E-ZPass, but "usually not a wedding band," Hall said.

"I'm just happy they got it," said Jackson, 22, of Peekskill.

An elated Medina-Torres returned the wedding band to her husband, who works at Bloom's Restaurant & Deli in Yorktown Heights.

"I think it's a great company," Torres, 39, said of Enterprise. "I was a lucky guy."