Chris Smith: Was her class ring in a drawer at El Molino for 20 years?

Lacey Andrews was going about her life in the East Bay when her phone rang. The caller identified himself as a Sonoma County deputy sheriff.

Probably not good.

“This is a little odd,” the lawman warned Andrews, who grew up in Bodega Bay. He urged her not to hang up on him.

Then he asked her, “Are you missing a class ring?”

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A CLASS RING. It was many moons since Andrews had thought about hers.

She bought it during her senior year, 1999-2000, at El Molino High School in Forestville.

“I was a kid,” she said. “I think it was probably one of my first pieces of actual jewelry.”

As much as she liked the class ring, which bore a garnet stone and her first name, she promptly lost it. “I have no idea how,” she said.

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WHEN CLASSES BEGAN at El Molino this past fall, students met the school’s first resource officer, Mark Aldridge.

It was a homecoming for the deputy sheriff. The fifth-generation Forestville resident graduated from El Molino in 1987.

Though new to the role of campus officer, Aldridge is a veteran law enforcement officer. In 2017, you may have read of the cool-headed valor he displayed to the three dozen adults and kids he counseled and consoled through the night that they hunkered in the parking lot of the Mark West Lodge, praying the Tubbs fire wouldn’t overrun them.

At El Molino a few weeks back, Aldridge was asked to sort through a drawer of lost-and-found and confiscated items. Inside the usually locked drawer were unclaimed cellphones, pocket knives, all manner of odds and ends.

And there was an envelope.

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CLASS RING, 2000, was written on it, and the name Lacey Andrews. Inside was a ring.

There is someone alive who knows where and when the ring had been found, and what efforts were made to return it to Lacey Andrews before it was relegated to the school lost-and-found/junk drawer. But I don’t know who that someone is.

Deputy Aldridge took it upon himself to find Lacey Andrews.

“I did some research,” he said. He found that a woman by that name lives in Pinole, in Contra Costa County, and works in the fitness spa trade. Aldridge phoned the Pinole Police Department, introduced himself and his mission to return a long-lost school ring and asked for help locating one Lacey Andrews. A PPD staffer gave him a phone number.

He dialed it.

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NO WAY, Andrews thought as the caller told of having her ring. “I thought it was a joke.”

But she didn’t hang up. And pretty soon she was believing that the guy on the phone really was a deputy, and a fellow El Molino alum, and he really was holding her class ring.

Days later, the ring Andrews lost 20 years ago arrived in the mail. She said she had it on as we spoke by phone Friday, one day after her 38th birthday.

“What a great guy,” she said of Deputy Aldridge. And what a detective.

“If I ever go missing, I hope he’s the one who finds me.”

The school resource officer said he just likes to help people. And it turns out there’s a specific reason that he could imagine how happy it might make Andrews to get her ring back.

“I lost my class ring in my senior year,” the deputy said.

You can reach Staff ?Writer Chris Smith at ?707-521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.