Purple Heart Returned To Its Rightful Owner

An Arizona woman who found a Purple Heart while working her shift at a thrift shop was able to reunite the item with the family of the man who earned it in the Korean War. Teresa Ferrin said she was working at the Christian Family thrift store in Phoenix when another employee brought her a piece of cardboard with multiple medals and other military paraphernalia attached. One of the items on the cardboard was a Purple Heart dating from 1951-1952. “I looked on the back of the Purple Heart and his name was there,” Ferrin told CNN. Ferrin said some online research determined the man, Korean War veteran Erik Karl Blauberg, had died in 1988. She said she was able to locate his grave in an Arizona cemetery, and that led her to calling an associated crematorium that was able to give her the names of Blauberg’s children. Ferrin said she then used Facebook to contact Blauberg’s daughter, Lisa Walker. “I didn’t even know he had a Purple Heart,” Walker told KPHO-TV. “It would be the only thing we ever had of my father’s.” Ferrin arranged to have the Purple Heart and the other items mailed to Walker in Florida. “My father was in Korea the exact same time that their father was in Korea,” Ferrin said. “And my father has passed away, so Lisa was saying it’s divine intervention because she finally got something from her father.”

https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2021/03/01/Purple-Heart-Arizona-thrift-store-Teresa-Ferrin/6361614618180/