NOEL, Mo. — Social media can be a powerful tool, and over the past week it helped reunite someone with something very important to them.
A local family saw this in full effect, as their usual summer tradition took an interesting turn.
“Just finding the owner, just finding the owner, I mean you know somebody out there is looking for something like that,” says Lashay Swem, Neosho Resident.
The day started like any other for the Swem family.
They were taking part in cleaning up Elk River with the Missouri Streams Team.
“Just down there doing one of our cleanups. We do about three a year, got our kids involved in this when they were about six and eight years old,” says Daniel Swem, Neosho Resident.
It’s become a tradition over the years to see what the kids could find.
“Kids love diving, picking up trash, finding sunglasses, finding cellphones,” says Daniel.
But this year was very different thanks to Daniel and Lashay’s daughter Tori.
“She was out there diving in 12, 14 foot of water looking for stuff, then she comes up after about five minutes of finding stuff and she hollers ‘I FOUND A TREASURE!’ and then she yanks up a prosthetic leg, right out of the water,” says Daniel.
“Your first instinct is like ‘What is that?’ and then she held it up all the way up out of the water and it was like, ‘Oh My Gosh!” Says Lashay Swem, Neosho Resident.
The family quickly took to the internet, asking their community on Facebook to help them find the leg’s owner.
“It wasn’t long after that, probably within four to five hours we had a message saying ‘I know the person that lost it over Memorial Weekend.’ We met him the next day, returning the leg at our church up in Joplin,” says Daniel.
Matt Dumas lost the leg when waters turned harsh over Memorial Day Weekend.
“He said he thought he was going to drown, and the only way that saved him was getting his leg off, he said it was an anchor, pulling him under,” says Daniel.
“Our main goal was to find out who the owner was,” says Lashay.
“This was just a freak deal that we found this treasure. You don’t expect something like that, it’s just a miracle, God’s miracle that we did that,” says Daniel.