Antique Store Find Leads To Search For Purple Heart Recipient

DALLAS (CBS11) - Browsing a Dallas antiques store, there were a lot of things that could have caught Joel Cude's eye. It was the name Larry Nobles that stopped him though.

He'd worked with a guy by the same name. This time it was on a gold name plate in a shadow box, below a dozen military medals. Cude didn't know what most of the medals were, but there was one he had no questions about.

"That's the one I recognized was the Purple Heart," he said. "That's a special one there."

Cude wasn't in the armed forces, but his brothers were.

He works for a military contractor, and the service is never far from his mind.

So as Memorial Day approached, and he kept thinking about the medals, he hit Google and Facebook. He sent messages to total strangers, trying to find the original owner.

"I sent out Facebook messages on Messenger to like five different Larry Nobles I saw," he said. "I only had one contact me back and he said, it wasn't him."

It's not unusual to find military medals for sale. The store owner at DFW M'Antiques said they turn up in estate sales, or from families cleaning out.

It just seemed to Cude that if the medals could be with a veterans family, they should.

Today though, he's still searching.

Something that someone paid a price to receive, he figures, is not something you can put a price on.