Strangers work together to reunite woman with beloved family heirloom lost on JetBlue flight

NEW YORK -- A woman from New York was traveling over the holidays when she lost a beloved piece of jewelry that had been in her family for nearly a century -- and a group of strangers worked together to help her track it down.

Diana Freedman recalled the devastating moment she realized her beloved grandmother's necklace was no long hanging from her neck.

"I kept trying to re-track in my brain where it could possibly be, I was devastated," Freedman said.

Her grandfather made the necklace for his lovely bride - a dancer who was asked to join the Rockettes almost 200 years ago - and embellished the pendant as his fortunes grew.

"It's like the American dream and a love story," Freedman said. "They were children of immigrants, and they came from nothing. And my grandfather gave my grandmother just a simple piece. And then when he had enough money, he had it mounted onto a heart. And then when he had enough money after that, he gave her a diamond to put in it."

Her grandmother never took it off until she bequeathed it to Freedman over 20 years ago.

"It's almost like a piece of her, really, that everyone remembered her by, and the fact that she wanted to see me wear it with my own children," Freedman said.

In turn, she never took it off, until that fateful December day after which a little sleuthing narrowed her focus to a JetBlue flight.

"A deputy at Palm Beach Airport that helped me zoom in to the video that they had on security camera," Freedman said. "He said that the necklace was not on me when I was leaving the terminal. So I knew that there was a good chance it was on this airplane."

She immediately posted an SOS on her local "Long Islands Amazing Moms" Facebook group. And as fate would have it, one of those 28,000 moms was a JetBlue executive.

"I work in operations. And so when I saw it, I immediately was like I can track that plane down, I know where that plane is right now," said Penny Neferis, JetBlue's head of business continuity.

The Jetblue teamwork took off with a chain reaction leading to JetBlue Stations Operator Tom Hungerman checking every single lost and found drawer at the Palm Beach International Airport.

"My God, it was amazing. It was amazing, and during the holidays, as you can imagine, with airport travel, it's a stressful time not only for the customers but for the workers as well," Hungerman said. "And so you don't always get these opportunities to create that magic moment, that holiday miracle, if you will."

And so 48 hours after it disappeared, Freedman was reunited with the heirloom.

"It was happy tears for a long time after that, and I still feel it right now, I feel so lucky and so blessed," Freedman said.