A favorite photo of the late Randy Reney is placed beside his 1989 class ring, which has been recently returned to his mother.

The Providence Journal Bob Thayer

The silver class ring belonged to a Fall River boy who never wanted to grow old.

It was all his parents had left when he died at 20, just two years after graduating from Diman Regional Vocational Tech.

Randy S. Reney was the youngest of four children, a tall young man that his mother said seemed to be searching for something that he never found, or just didn’t find in time. He worked at the American Dryer Co. in Fall River after graduation, and then joined the Army and was sent to Fort Benning, Ga. A few months later, Randy died during a trip home in May 1991.

His cherished possession was his 1989 class ring. It went to his father, Henry, who wore it until his death 11 years later. Then the ring went to his mother, Olive, who found the ring as a way of keeping Randy close.

One night in February 2003, her cousin invited her to go to Foxwoods, and Reney decided that she’d wear her son’s ring outside the house just this once.

The silver band was heavy on her arthritic fingers, though, and after a while playing slot machines, Reney put the ring in her purse. Although she usually wore her purse around her neck, this time, she set it on one of the machines as she played. And then she lost track of it.

By the time Mrs. Reney realized her purse was missing and called security and state police, someone had emptied the purse and dumped it in another area. All she cared about was her son’s ring. She couldn’t forgive herself for letting it out of her sight. It was all Randy had left behind.

LATE LAST MONTH, a police detective in West Warwick was scanning through a computer database of recent pawnshop receipts when he saw something that looked out of place: a Diman class ring from 1989, sold by a young man with a passport. The man’s name didn’t fit the name engraved in the band, not to mention that the seller would have been about a year old during that graduation year. It was sold on Oct. 26 for $35 to Chief’s Discount Jewelry in Warwick.

Detective Robert DiCarlo won the 2005 Justice Award for his proficiency in cracking stolen goods cases by using the precious-metals and pawn database of the attorney general’s office. He followed his instincts again, searching for the man whose name was engraved in the ring.

Reney came home that afternoon to her family’s double-decker and heard a stranger’s voice on her answering machine: “Randall Reney? Randy Reney? Did you authorize the sale of your ring?”

It was DiCarlo. She called him back immediately. My son has been dead for 15 years, she told him. DiCarlo told her, we’ve found his ring.

When a dispute arose with the pawnshop over payment for the ring, West Warwick Detective Roland Coutu went to the store and retrieved it for Reney.

Last Friday, Nov. 3, DiCarlo and Coutu met Olive Reney in a parking lot at Alpert’s Furniture Showplace in Seekonk. She had a copy of her son’s obituary to show the detectives. “I wanted them to know who he was,” she said.

She cried as the detectives handed her Randy’s ring. “They deserve the best,” she said of Coutu and DiCarlo. “They made me very happy. They made all my world.”

WHILE THE STATUTE of limitations on larceny has expired in Connecticut, Rhode Island’s statute on receiving stolen goods has not. DiCarlo is investigating the young seller and the circumstances of the ring’s reappearance. “If that ring could talk,” he said.

Thirty-two miles away in Fall River, Reney sits in her favorite rocking chair by her living room windows and looks at the class ring. The 72-year-old woman wears it on the ring finger of her right hand, because arthritis has swollen the knuckles on her left. The red stone shines in the sunlight coming through the curtains.

Framed pictures of her husband of 48 years, their children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren hang on every wall, along with pictures of Randy. One photo of him in his Army uniform is hung next to pictures of two of Reney’s grandsons wearing Marine uniforms. They were small boys when Randy died. Now, they are young men, returned from tours in Iraq.

It was 10 years before Reney could bear to display pictures of Randy. Talking about him now brings her to tears. She thinks often about the night before he died, when he happened to stop over at her apartment, and she could see something was troubling him. “He didn’t want to get old. Sometimes, parents don’t see what’s wrong with their children because they don’t talk,” she says. “I said, Talk to me. But he wouldn’t talk. He said I was too old.”

She glances at his class ring again, and speaks her thoughts aloud.

“It’s been such a long time,” she says. “He would have been 35 now. I wonder what he would have been like.”