Facebook reunites vet, memento he lost at beach
Yasmine Todhunter always told her husband that someday she’d find a message in a bottle. On the beach near their Fort Lauderdale home, the couple had found so many odd things that the prediction didn’t seem far-fetched.
Last Saturday, the message came — in the form of a worn metal bracelet in the sand. It bore the names CW3 Phil Windorski, CW2 Matt Kelley, CW2 Josh Tillery, CW2Ben Todd.
“We’re not military people,” Yasmine Todhunter said. “So we didn’t know what that meant. We went home and Googled the names and a date: Jan. 25, 2009.”
The four, it turned out, were chief warrant officers — U.S. servicemen killed aboard two Army helicopters on a nighttime mission in northern Iraq, shot down by anti-aircraft missiles. The object was a memorial bracelet, a memento sent by the men’s unit to the family members.
Todhunter posted the information on her Facebook page Saturday afternoon in hopes of finding the owner. Within three
days, the post had been shared nearly 200,000 times — from Kuwait to Australia to Japan to Canada to every single state in America.
And the mystery started to unravel.
The day the bracelet was found, the widow of Matthew Kelley happened to be flying from her Missouri home into Fort Lauderdale on vacation with her new husband and three children, two of them from Matthew.
But DaLana Kelley Kunellis didn’t hear about the find for a couple of days, until the family came to Orlando and Kunellis got a text from one of her best friends, Karin Windorski Cruz, the widow of Phil Windorski, who now lives in Jacksonville.
“Have you seen what’s happening on Facebook?” Cruz asked.
Kunellis still had her memorial bracelet, but she checked with other family members to see whether they had lost theirs. Kelley’s brother, a fellow veteran who lives near Kunellis in Missouri, mentioned he had lost his in the ocean on a motorcycle trip to Daytona Beach — two years ago.
The timing of its discovery, Kunellis said, seemed more than coincidental.
Matthew Kelley was 35 when he was killed a little more than five years ago. The anniversary was an especially difficult one.
Though Kunellis has remarried and has a 4-month-old baby, there is still a great sense of loss. The sadness can catch her at unexpected times.
“One of the biggest things you fear as a widow is that people will forget your husband, your children’s father,” Kunellis, 29, said Tuesday from a Kissimmee hotel near Disney. “Their grief is so different than adults’, and as they get older and reach different milestones, it hits them in new ways. It has been a tough road for them.”
But the way so many strangers reached out, the way they went to such lengths to share the discovery of the bracelet and seemed to care about its return — Kunellis found it “humbling.”
“It is almost like Matt is saying hi, like he’s looking down on us,” she said. “And it helps with the pain on those days whenyou’re wiping your kids’ tears because they miss him so much.”
Daughter Megan is 11 now. Son Tyler is 9. “My father is not forgotten,” Tyler said.
Cruz, who had already been planning to visit Orlando later this week to reunite with her friend, will now be here Friday, when the Todhunters drive from Fort Lauderdale to return the bracelet.
“It has been bittersweet,” Todhunter said. “It reminds how much some have suffered for our freedom.” campaign from Broward County political consultant Judith Stern to establish residency in the county.
The new rule requires lawmakers to make their home in the districts they were elected to serve, and it provides a list of criteria for establishing where they live if someone files an ethics complaint against a lawmaker.
Gambling
The two chambers are at odds on other hot-button issues, including whether to expand destination casinos into Broward and MiamiDade counties or let voters statewide make that decision.
The House this week released a proposal creating a new gambling commission but not allowing Las Vegasstyle destination casinos to crop up in South Florida — contrary to a Senate version released last week.
Incoming Senate President Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, said he thought the whole issue might be “a heavy lift” this spring and could wait until the state renegotiates an agreement with the Seminole Tribe next year.
Sexual predators
Without delay, the Senate approved a landmark package of laws policing cracking down on policing and sentencing of sexual predators.
“If you have a plague, you want to know where it is and contain it,” Gaetz said.
The proposed changes would allow continued lockup of sexual predators once they complete their prison terms if evaluators determine that they are still a threat.
Senators passed the four bills 40-0. The House is expected to approve the same