A lost burial flag that was nearly thrown away was found and returned last week to a fallen Navy hero's wife who was "devastated" to have lost the item during a recent move, Fox 31 reported.
Navy veteran Peter Mikulin came across the flag after he was hired to clean out a Denver storage facility. As a military service member, he could not believe that the flag lay discarded and forgotten.
"It's a disgrace. It's an insult," he told Fox 31. "This belonged to a hero."
Mikulin was determined to return the flag to its rightful owner and, with the help of Fox 31's "Problem Solvers," managed to track down Christine Rogers, the widow of Chief Petty Officer Larry Rogers, who served 25 years in the U.S. Navy.
It turns out the flag went missing along with many other items when Christine Rogers relocated to the Beaver State.
Christine Rogers explained in a Facebook post that, while moving, she received a call from lawyers notifying her that the company with which she had stored her belongings were under criminal investigation and had lost their lease.
She was given a week to clear out the storage unit and, although she arranged to have her belongings delivered to her new address, only a third of her items made it to the new home.
"All my personal belongings and houseware are missing, along with just about everything else," she said in her post.
This included all her husband's military belongings along with "any memorabilia I had of our marriage and life together."
Christine Rogers said in a separate post to Facebook that she could not believe Mikulin and the team from Fox 31 had tracked her down to return the flag.
"After all my loss through this situation, getting this flag back means the most," she wrote.
"It's absolutely the only thing I have of memorabilia of our life together and his military time," she further told Fox 31. "I spent a whole day crying about it. It was devastating, but I had to tell myself you just have to let it go."
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