Giants player loses both Super Bowl rings after leaving them on hood of car
Did you ever drive off after running some errands and wonder where your coffee is, only to realize the answer is all over the parking lot because you left the cup on the roof of your car?
Well, it could be worse. The coffee could have been a pair of Super Bowl rings with a combined value of $34,000.
Zak DeOssie, long snapper for the New York Patriot Killers … er, Giants … was at a charity event on May 2 where the rings were the centerpiece of DeOssie leveraging his fame into doing some good. He had them at the Grand Summit Hotel for America Needs You, a charity dedicated to helping low-income students become the first in their families to go to college.
After the event, when DeOssie got home, he realized the rings were gone and immediately called the police, fearing they had been stolen.
The Summit, New Jersey, Police Department investigated, and this is where the story gets a bit better for DeOssie, NJ.com reports.
It turns out one good-hearted soul was walking his dog the morning of May 3 and noticed some shattered glass on the ground. When he went to pick up the glass as a good neighbor, he saw a box with a ring under it.
The ring was from Super Bowl XLVI, with DeOssie’s name on it, and the man, upon realizing what he’d found and that it belonged to his neighbor, turned the ring in to police to reunite it with its rightful owner.
“The next morning I got an email from a neighbor saying he found one of my two rings underneath the remnants of what my Super Bowl box was,” DeOssie said.
“It looked like it got wrecked or run over at some point, or just flat-out fell on the ground,” the former Giant said. “I went over to his house, gave him a hug and thanked him. The ring was in perfect condition.”
The other ring, from Super Bowl XLII, remains at large, and it seems unlikely that it will be found.
One, it’s been gone for six weeks, and any police officer will tell you that the colder a case gets, the less likely it becomes that the case will be solved.
Two, it’s probably in a landfill somewhere in New Jersey.
The same guy who found the ring that got returned remarked that he threw away the box without looking to see what was inside it; it was only because the ring was under the box that it got discovered. If the other ring was in the box, it ended up in a bin.
Or, just as likely, a street sweeper could have happened by wherever DeOssie originally parked his car, swept up the ring and delivered it to its final resting place that way.
That’s not to say a good search wasn’t conducted to find it; Summit police went above and beyond the call of duty to go looking in some awful places.
“I coordinated with the detectives in Summit who were super helpful,” DeOssie said. “The city of Summit even came over to check the sewers near where we found the first ring, to no avail.”
Worry not for DeOssie, however; the ring was insured, and the insurance company will allow a replacement ring to be made to replace the $15,000 piece of NFL history.
For DeOssie, however, it simply isn’t the same.
“Nothing will ever replace the original,” he said. “These rings are near and dear to my heart, and it was a sad, sad realization that I haphazardly misplaced them. I’m definitely getting a new one made, and hopefully over time I can enjoy it just as much as I did the first one.”
DeOssie has been a fixture in the community since winning that first ring in his rookie season in 2007, and if there is any lesson to be taken from all this, it’s always check on and around your car before you drive off.
Because spilled coffee could be the least of your worries.
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