Woman Reunited With Family Photos Found By Road Crew

BURLESON (CBSDFW.COM) - Burleson public works employees thought they were picking up trash in the middle of the road, until they saw what was inside.

"It was obviously not junk," said Aaron Russell, Director of Public Works. "It looked like important memorabilia."

What the crew had picked up was a mystery. A box with a clock and a picture of John Wayne underneath it, photo collages of a family on vacation, a framed picture of a baby sleeping next to his grandfather and a huge, black and white picture with more than two dozen people of all ages meticulously posed in The Stockyards. Who were these people?

The city put their find on Facebook asking for help locating the owner.

"The next thing I know I got a phone call from my daughter-in-law, Cindy," said Burleson resident Dorothy Coggins. "And she called me and goes, 'Dorothy, I was on Facebook and, hey! That's us!'"

The box contained the precious family memories Coggins was moving to storage in the back of her pick-up as her husband followed behind.

"And it was just sitting in there and the next thing I know its gone!" she exclaimed. "So, we backtracked the whole entire route and never even saw it."

Within hours of losing her precious cargo Coggins was hugging the yellow, safety-shirted men who recovered it.

"You have no idea what this means to me," she told them. "You can't replace memories."

But of all the memories recovered, she was most thankful for the crowded, black-and-white portrait from The Stockyards.

"This is like the picture of pictures," Coggins cooed as she began to point out people in the photo.

"There's Stephen with sarah, there's Matthew and Terry, there's my son..."

It's the only time, other than a funeral, her huge family from two marriages was all together to have their picture made.

"That's a chore to get all those together down at the stockyards," Coggins said. "Awesome, awesome. I'm so glad to have it back."

"This was not a small thing for her," Russell said. "It's a little out of the ordinary for us. But we obviously had the opportunity to get it back to her."

"I am so thankful," she laughed. "I'm going to put them in the back of my car and hand deliver them myself to storage! I will not let my husband tie them up in the back of the truck again."

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