Blake Hall
Though this Purple Heart was priced at a low $4.99 at an Arizona Goodwill, the heroism and sacrifice it took to get that medal was priceless.
Laura Hardy was thrift shopping for a St. Patrick’s Day outfit when she noticed the Purple Heart on display. Shocked that a medal of valor would be for sale at a secondhand store, Hardy bought the medal with the intent of returning it to its rightful owner.
“This is not right that this is in a Goodwill,” Laura Hardy said. “We’re going to take it out and try to connect with its family.”
The name on the back of the medal indicated that it belonged to a World War II veteran named Eual H. Whiteman. Hardy asked the military community to help find Whiteman’s family on Facebook. Her post was shared 99,000 times!
With a little help from a group called Veteran Buddy Finders, Hardy located Whiteman’s only living relative: his former sister-in-law Phyllis Lawson. A Missouri resident, Lawson had married and divorced Whiteman’s younger brother. She told ABC News that Whiteman was much older than her ex-husband, so they weren’t very close.
“He and my ex-husband were 16 years apart and he left for the military when Robert was extremely young and then he just kind of stayed gone,” Lawson said. “He came home once a few weeks after his mother died and stayed about a week and then he was gone again.”
According to military records, Whiteman enlisted in the Army in 1940. He served with the 82nd Airborne Division and earned three battle stars, a Combat Badge and a Presidential Unit Badge as well as a Purple Heart. Now he is buried in Willamette National Cemetery in Oregon.
No one knows how the medal ended up in an Arizona thrift store. Goodwill said in a statement to ABC News that it doesn’t condone the sale of military medals.
We have a process in place for all of our donation attendants that when they identify an item of significance, like a medal, we ask them to pull it aside and we try to contact either the Veterans Affairs Department or local authorities. They are processing thousands of items every day so this was unfortunately an example of an item that slipped through and wasn’t identified as a Purple Heart.