They say that sometimes when you lose things, they have a way of coming back to you.
Though Jed Mottley, a varsity football player at Chaparral HS in Scottsdale, Arizona in the 90s, couldn’t wait to get his hands on his customized letterman jacket, he would have to wait almost three more decades for that day to come.
“I went to a store right down the street here and we picked everything out, we might have even put a deposit down,” Jed told ABC15.
Unfortunately, the custom-made jacket ended up costing about $300 when it was time to pick it up.
It was a price his mother couldn’t afford, at the time, so they had to leave the jacket at the store.
“I was embarrassed,” Jed recalls. “I felt like we grew up with a lot of money around Scottsdale and I came from a broken family. It was nice because I got to borrow their clothes, ride in their nice cars and hang out at their houses, but you know, (at home) it was just a little bit different,” Jed told Daily Mail.
“She always wanted us to have everything, but we just couldn’t get it with everything we were going through at the time.”
Jed, who now lives in California, accepted the situation and never thought he would see the finished jacket.
But he did after someone found it in a thrift store 28 years. That someone was his own brother Josh Mottley who Jed hadn’t seen in years.
“Is this divine intervention? I don’t know. It’s really fun to think about,” Jed told Inside Edition.
Something told Josh he was going to find something cool in the Pinetop, Arizona thrift stop that day.
He usually only heads over there if he has a “feeling.” A bright red jacket with the name “Jed” and “Class of 94” on it was the first thing he saw when he walked into the store. If it wasn’t hanging in front of hundreds of others, Josh said he would have never seen it.
Josh snapped a photo of it and sent it to his brother who immediately recognized it.
Both brothers believed that their mother’s spirit was behind this serendipitous occurrence.
“My mom was very religious and would say to us all the time, when I die, I’m gonna come back and give you signs and stuff and that never really happened,” said Josh.
That is until he found that jacket. Josh flew out to L.A. to bring his brother the jacket after not having seen him in years.
This jacket was in a lot donated to the thrift store by the business that made the jackets after the business closed.
This time it cost just $25 and is believed to never have been worn since it had the “inspected by” tag was still in the pocket.
“If I had this the whole time, it would probably be all beat up and sit in the back of my closet. Now I’m going to wear this thing with pride,” Jed told Arizona’s Family.
Jed said he thought about the jacket over the years and recalls being sad that he was the only one on the team without one.
“It’s one of those things that something so painful can turn out so beautiful years later and you got to just ride it out, you never know what’s around the corner, life’s a trip,” said Jed.
Learn more about the miraculous find in the video below.
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