He found a ring by the road. Why this homeless man spent months looking for its owner.

It was lying on its side in the grass between the sidewalk and the street near Two Keys Tavern on South Limestone.

When Robert “Shorty” Eads found the ring in August he knew the owner would want it back. The 2011 Georgetown College football Final Four ring was more than just jewelry — someone had worked hard for that ring.

“I know it meant something to somebody,” Eads said recently. “If it was the last thing that I did, I was going to get that ring back to its owner.”

So Eads spent the next three months trying to find its owner. He called Georgetown College’s athletics department. No one called him back. He got on the internet and searched Facebook. Nothing.

Eads, a former electrician who has been homeless for eight years, had his backpack — where he keeps everything he owns — stolen four different times over the next three months. He lost everything. But not the ring.

“I always kept it on me,” Eads explained.

Eads has worked on the city’s End Panhandling Now jobs van almost since the program began in May 2017. The program puts would-be panhandlers to work picking up trash and litter and pays them. Frustrated that no one would call him back, Eads asked Jarrod Jones, the supervisor of the jobs van, for help in November.

Jones, a retired Lexington police officer, posted photos of the ring on Facebook. Other retired police officers saw Jones’ post and got on the case. The ring itself had clues. On one side was “Schmitz” and the number 15.

Don Schmitz was at home in Union in Northern Kentucky when his phone rang a week or so before Thanksgiving.

“I almost didn’t pick it up,” Schmitz said. It’s usually a telemarketer.

But he did. On the other line was a police officer. Was Mr. Schmitz related to a Georgetown College football player?

“I said, ‘Wait, did you find the ring?” Schmitz said.

His son, Adam Schmitz, lost the ring while attending a wedding in Lexington this summer. Adam Schmitz now lives in Denver.

The younger Schmitz, who graduated from Georgetown in 2013, said the ring means a lot.

“That’s the farthest we went when I was there,” Adam Schmitz said of the 2011 season, when the 12-1 team made it into the final four of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics championship. Schmitz was a wing back.

He normally doesn’t wear the ring, but it was a former football teammate who got married in August. So he wore it for sentimental reasons.

“I only wore it for special occasions because I was afraid of losing it,” Adam Schmitz said in a phone interview from Colorado.

Schmitz said he and a bunch of his college friends went out after the wedding reception. He’s still not sure how it ended up on the side of the street.

He thought the ring was gone for good. Then in November, he got a call from a Boone County sheriff’s deputy who had seen Jones’ Facebook post.

But before Adam Schmitz could contact Jones, his father had already called the former police officer.

“Within an hour (of the Facebook post) I was on the phone with the father,” said Jones.

Don Schmitz drove to Lexington one Sunday before Thanksgiving and met Jones and got his son’s ring back. He gave Jones $100 to give to Eads. Schmitz said he would have given him more, but he is temporarily out of work right now because he needs a shoulder replaced.

“I would have liked to have met him,” Don Schmitz said of Eads. “I can’t thank him enough. It was a Christmas gift to all of us. There are still good people out there.”

Eads could have pawned the ring.

“If anybody needed the money, it’s him,” Don Schmitz said. “Instead, he kept it and the diligence and the homework it took to get it back to us... He really made our Christmas.”

Tyler Hurst, executive director of the New Life Day Center, the homeless day shelter that oversees the jobs van program, said people often equate morality with wealth. Eads doesn’t have a home. But he never lost his moral compass, he said.

“Robert is a great guy,” Hurst said. “People sometimes only see who that person is today. They don’t know about that person’s past. And they don’t see who they can be.”

The van gives people like Eads a chance to have a job. So many give up and think they can’t get work or no one wants to hire them, Hurst said.

“This gives people purpose,” Hurst said.

The program has also cut the number of panhandlers on Lexington streets, according to recent counts. In May 2017, there were between 150 to 160 panhandlers on Lexington streets within a 12 hour period. In November 2018, there were 21, 11 of whom were picked up and given a job on the van.

The city of Lexington funds the van but also relies heavily on donations to Lexgive. com to pay the would-be panhandlers.

Eads has been a longtime employee on the van. Hurst said they are working to get him off the street.

The younger Schmitz will be home for Christmas and will be reunited with his Final Four ring.

“I think I may just leave it with my parents,” Adam Schmitz said, laughing. “I don’t want to lose it again.”