LA fires: Man proposes to girlfriend after finding engagement ring in ashes of destroyed home
LA fires: Man proposes to girlfriend after finding engagement ring in ashes of destroyed home
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A California man stunned his girlfriend with an impromptu proposal after discovering the engagement ring he thought he’d lost in the Los Angeles wildfires. Brian McShea and Stephanie Raynor visited the charred remains of their Altadena home to see if anything had survived the flames of the Eaton Fire. The new groom-to-be, secretly determined to find the ring he had hidden in a desk drawer, suggested they sift through the rubble where it once stood.
“I was thinking, ‘Well, maybe the stone can survive, and maybe we’ll find the little stone,’” McShea said. “I thought the ring was going to completely disintegrate.” The Eaton Fire, part of a series of devastating wildfires across Los Angeles County earlier this month, burned more than 14,000 acres, destroyed over 16,000 structures, and claimed at least 28 lives.
The couple had fled their home on January 7, shortly before the fire razed it to the ground. As McShea searched, he admitted he didn’t have high hopes of finding anything intact. “So we’re digging around where my desk is, again just looking for a stone - man, I really didn’t have a lot of hope,” he said.
“But you just brush away some rubble, and there’s a little ring, and you pick that up, and it’s actually a washer to something, and that happened like four times, and then you pick it up, and there’s a little diamond.” The discovery changed McShea’s plans. Though he’d intended to propose sometime in the future, he couldn’t wait and got down on one knee right there among the ruins of their home.
