Wedding set after jeweler’s donation

PANAMA CITY — A local jeweler has given a $6,000 engagement ring to a couple who accidentally lost theirs when the bride-to-be donated pants with the ring hidden inside to the Goodwill store in Lynn Haven.

Maharaja’s Fine Jewelry donated the ring to Jacelyn Penton, who has accepted the marriage proposal from longtime boyfriend Corey Todd.

Jewelry store owner Manu Samtani said he was touched after reading a News Herald story about the couple losing their first ring at the Goodwill. “It was very sad,” he said.

He said it is gratifying to be able to help out.

“When I got robbed in my two stores, the whole community came together for me, so I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “You never know what is ahead of you. You take every day with a smile and when you can help, you help.”

It took Corey Todd, who works at Chili’s, three years to save up for the first $6,000 diamond engagement ring and marriage band. In June, he hid the ring in a pair of dress pants in a closet in a guest room of his house that he didn’t use often. He was planning on handing the ring to his longtime girlfriend July 7 when he proposed marriage. He said he was waiting until Penton had finished nursing school.

But the pants ended up at the Goodwill store in Lynn Haven. Penton, in an attempt to get rid of clutter in their house, donated the pants with the ring inside its pocket. The ring never showed up after that.

Todd said if the jewelry store had not made the donation, it might have taken him a year or two to once again save up thousands of dollars for another engagement ring, delaying their marriage. He said they are now planning to marry in September of next year.

He said he is grateful to the jewelry store.

“I appreciate what they did,” he said. “It was nice of them.”

He said he also is excited about getting married to a woman he has had a crush on since middle school. They started dating in 2005 when they worked at a local grocery store.

Penton, who works as a nurse at HealthSouth Emerald Coast Rehabilitation Hospital, was surprised with the ring at work last week. Penton was asked whether she wanted to be in a television commercial promoting the hospital, but instead it was a fake shoot organized by a few hospital employees and the jewelry store’s marketing manager to surprise Penton with the ring. Only a few employees at the hospital knew about it, so the surprise didn’t leak out, said Pamela Kidwell, who handles marketing for Maharaja’s Fine Jewelry.

She said they decided to do it that way because Penton had said when the ring was lost at Goodwill, it dampened what could have been a magical moment of being proposed to by her longtime boyfriend.

“She said, ‘Now the magic is gone out of the moment,’ “ Kidwell said. “It kind of turned into a bad story. She wanted a magical moment when great things happen. We were trying to put the surprise back into it, and worked with HealthSouth’s staff to pull it off.”

Todd and family members were in waiting to greet Penton when she came in the room thinking she would be in a television commercial.

Cindy Carpenter, the director of marketing for the hospital, said Penton didn’t have a clue what was happening until she walked in the room.

“I think she was in shock,” Carpenter said. “She was kind of speechless. She walked in and Corey got on his knees and proposed, and she did start crying then.”

Penton said he felt “blessed” to have the ring donated to her and be treated to the surprise.

“It did work out in the long run,” she said. “I didn’t think it would, but it did.”

She was even able to pick out the kind of ring she preferred from the jewelry store.

“I like the solitary diamond,” she said. “It is a princess-cut with little diamonds around the band. It is a very, very nice setting.”

Penton said she was surprised at how the story of them losing the ring was picked up by so many news outlets. “It was on the ‘Today’ show,” she said.