Purple Heart sold for $4.99 at Goodwill store: ‘They just rang it up’

A Purple Heart belonging to a World War II veteran will soon be returned to the recipient’s family after it wound up in the jewelry section of an Arizona Goodwill store.

Laura Hardy said she purchased the prestigious medal for less than $5 and  posted a photo of it on Facebook, along with the name on the back of the medal, Eual H. Whiteman, ABC News reported.

“It was just classified as purple jewelry for $4.99,” Ms. Hardy said. “They just rang it up … no comment from the people at the register or anywhere.”

Ms. Hardy received a phone call Tuesday morning from Veteran Buddy Finder, a program which helps veterans locate each other.

Tina Cook, who runs the program, told ABC News she used a genealogy website and a newspaper archive website to find mentions of Whiteman, and ultimately found a living relative: his former sister-in-law Phyllis Lawson.

“There’s a mystery person out there somewhere that gave that to the Goodwill,” Ms. Lawson, 68, told ABC News. “I have no idea how it got there.”

Ms. Lawson had divorced Whiteman’s younger brother, Robert Alan Whiteman, in the 1980s. She said she never knew much about Eual Whiteman, who was much older than his brother.

“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,” Ms. Lawson said. “He came home once a few weeks after his mother died and stayed about a week and then he was gone again.”

Whiteman died in 1991 and is buried in the Willamette National Cemetery in Oregon, according to military records. Ms. Cook’s research found that he also earned a Combat Badge and a Presidential Unit Badge with the 82nd Airborne Division, ABC News reported.

Ms. Hardy planned to mail the Purple Heart to Ms. Lawson in Missouri on Wednesday.

Goodwill called the situation unfortunate and offered to reimburse Ms. Hardy the $4.99 sale price.

“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,” Courtney Nelson, vice president of marketing and communications for Goodwill of Central Arizona, told ABC News. “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.”