Diamond in the rough
Paramus officer refuses to give up search,
finds lost engagement ring
n BY LISA ARCELLA
Changing a tire on Route 17 probably rates fairly high on the
stress scale, what with cars whizzing by and darting in and out
of the strip malls that line the highway. Nevertheless, when
27-year-old Kimberly Garcia got a flat on Sept. 17, she pulled
over to do the job herself. When she eventually returned to her
Midland Park home, she suddenly realized something was ter-
ribly wrong.
“As soon as I got there, I realized my engagement ring was
gone,” she says. “I had a pit in my stomach. Dan, my fiancé, and
I immediately went back to where I had pulled off and searched
and searched but it was gone.”
Dan seemed to take it better than Kimberly. “We kept trying
to tell ourselves it was just a ring, but I was very upset. I never
had something so special before and now it was lost,” Kimberly
explains. “Dan said that we would just get another ring but we
continued to search for it for two days. I’m not even sure how it
slipped off.”
As a last resort, the bride-to-be went to the Paramus Police
Department to ask for help. That’s where she met Paramus Lo-
cal 186 member Jon Henderson, who would soon become Gar-
cia’s knight in body armor.
“We searched through her car again and didn’t find it,” Hen-
derson remembers. “I said that I would go back to the scene and
look for it. It didn’t seem likely that I would find it, but I prom-
ised. Where I come from, when you give your word you follow
through on it.”
So the next day, the officer who has been on the job and pa-
trol for just a few years finished another call in the area and then
went to look for the missing diamond ring.
“I was walking the area when I saw some something shiny. I
walked over and it was a key ring. I was like, ‘ugh,’” he laughed.
But within 10 feet, he spotted something sparkling in the sun-
light.
“I thought, ‘Wow what are the chances?’ When I looked at it,
I thought that it was the same ring she had showed me in the
pictures,” he added.
After returning to the police station, Henderson immediately
logged the ring into evidence so there was no chance of it get-
ting lost again. And he called Kimberly.
“He asked me if I was sitting down,” she recalled. “When he
told me that he had found it, I was stunned and so relieved. He
found the needle in the haystack and I was so grateful.”
Henderson downplays the service as just being in the right
place at the right ti me.
“If you could help someone out with something, why wouldn’t
you do it?” the six-year member of Local 186 asks. “Her face lit
Paramus Local 186 member Jon Henderson with Kimberly Garcia
up when she came back to pick it up. That smile alone made
everything worthwhile.”
Henderson says he became a law enforcement officer be-
cause he wanted to help people and couldn’t picture himself in
a desk job. The unpredictability of the job completely appealed
to him. The most unusual call he ever got was when someone
called and said a goat was knocking on their door.
“I said there was no way a goat was wandering around Para-
mus,” he recounts. “As I went around the side of the house, sure
enough there was a goat tilting his head at me. I was almost like
looking at Santa: ‘Wow, he does exist.’ We tried to corral the goat,
and it crossed the street as it ran away. Finally, I had a blanket
and was waiting for the goat to batter me, but it was calm and
was just waiting for someone to help him out.”
The goat is now living out his days on a local farm, and mean-
while Garcia’s wedding is back on track for August 2018. It’s likely
that Officer Henderson will be getting an invitation in the mail.
“I just cannot thank him enough for what he did,” she says.
“I brought him a gift card and he said that he couldn’t accept it,
but it was honestly the least I could do.”
Henderson also took away a valuable lesson if he ever gets
engaged one day.
“Make sure to take out insurance on the ring,” he laughs. d
www.njcopsmagazine.com
■ OCTOBER 2017 65