RICHMOND, Ky. (LEX 18) — The giving season is fast approaching.
For nearly 40 years, David Hamilton has been hoping to make a mystery more clear.
"The note said I'll pick them back up and he never did," Hamilton said about a note in a box that was left at his front door. "And I've held them since 1985."
Inside the box were military medals and a book belonging to Sim Smeddley Steverson.
"He gave up his life," Hamilton said. "He saved a whole platoon."
Steverson was killed in Vietnam in 1967. Hamilton hadn't been able to find the family.
On Wednesday just before noon, Hamilton took one long look at a home on the left side of a cul-de-sac. Clenched under his arm was a plastic bag with something Deborah Steverson Anderson had been looking for.
"My handwriting was better back then than it is now," she said while flipping through a book she had signed after her father's death.
"He's always got his own plan and he'll reveal it when it's time," she added.
Hamilton has held onto these medals and this book. All he has wanted is for this family to get a piece of their past back where it belongs.
"I don't know how you ended up with them," Anderson said to Hamilton. "My brother and I have tried to piece together what happened. But the fact that you hung onto them for all these years."
All these years, a family was missing a piece of this patriotism.
"My grandchildren are my heart," Anderson said. "That one right there — he's my oldest grandbaby and I wanted them to know, I wanted him to know, what my daddy did and what this family is about."
"This is one of those things that needs to be wrapped up," she added. "We're all getting older and this is so important. This is a part of me. It's daddy and it's a part of me."
