It started with a wedding proposal and ended with a dozen churchgoers up to their armpits in pond water. The Kansas City Star reports Maddie Villareal was supposed to be filming a romantic engagement between her friends Seth Dixon and Ruth Salas Saturday in Kansas City's Loose Park. Her cellphone video shows the couple standing on a wooden footbridge over a pond when Dixon gets down on one knee and takes out a small box. Then: disaster. Dixon opens the box and a $3,000 diamond ring—on which the Uber driver is still making payments—falls out and slips through a crack in the bridge. “It ping-ponged from one plank to another," Salas says. "You could hear a little plop.”
Villareal, Salas, and Dixon all got into the water. “There was so much mud and nasty algae,” Villareal says. They hunted until it was dark but couldn't find the ring. A metal detector Sunday morning similarly failed. Later Sunday, a few dozen members of the couple's church came down to help, but still no ring. The couple, who are getting married in October, set up a GoFundMe page to buy a replacement ring but shut it down after raising $261. "It's been a roller coaster. Emotions have been up and down," Dixon tells KSHB. "After seeing the video over and over we just started laughing about it." Church member Staci Dabney, who took photos of the doomed search, is equally upbeat. "Sometimes our love stories aren't always as perfect as we planned, but always work out in the end," KCRA quotes Dabney as saying. (More marriage proposal stories.)
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