By Heidi Pérez-Moreno
Brett Bunce was ready to accept that his family would never see their luggage again. Then he saw the look on his stepdaughter's face.
British Airways lost their bags weeks earlier, somewhere in between flights from Miami to London to Florence.
Bunce's family went about their long-planned European vacation, spending thousands of dollars to replace the contents of their luggage.
They kept hope they'd reclaim their belongings. But once they were back home in Jupiter, Florida, friends and loved ones told them it was a lost cause. The airline still had not given them an update.
One day after school, 14-year-old Carolina Bonasoro broke down.
With her voice cracking and tears beginning to form on her face, she tried to explain.
Her mother, Gwyneth Bonasoro, took her upstairs, and Carolina told her it wasn't just the dresses she was upset about.
Her late grandmother's white pearl bracelet was in those bags. She also stowed dozens of loose gold coins, including a rare lira piece, that her mother gifted her to help her connect with her Italian heritage.
She was particularly upset about the bracelet, an irreplaceable symbol of the woman her family lost years ago.
"It was like having a piece of her there, with me," Carolina said.
With little help from the airline, Bunce decided to take matters into his own hands.
He was going back to Florence. A week and roughly $4,000 (about R75,000) in travel fees later, he brought the luggage home, jewellery and all, with assistance from a random email he received from a good Samaritan.
After Carolina broke the news about losing her grandmother's jewellery, Bunce threw out the idea of a last-minute trip back to Florence through American Airlines.
Fourth of July weekend was about a week away, so he arranged an extra day off from work and a four-day trip, costing him around $4,000 in total.
"I needed to make sure we exhausted all of our options before we could really make peace with losing our luggage, and losing something that was basically irreplaceable to our family," Bunce said.
His only clue was an email from a stranger, Anne Johnson, from Colorado, who was also looking for her own lost bags in Florence.
"Your bag is in the lost luggage area," she wrote in her initial June 19 email, which The Post reviewed. "Go to the airport lost and found, show them your lost luggage claim, and ask to go in and look."
Johnson, an engineering professor at the Air Force Academy, said she happened to see the names and flight details for the Bonasoro-Bunce family on their bag tags.
"I'm gonna find this thing and I'm gonna get it back," she said. "If I hadn't done that, it would probably still be sitting in Florence. I fully believe that they would not have gotten to it."
Johnson said she picked a few bags she saw in a lost luggage area and memorized the emails on the tags to reach out.
At first, Bunce said he thought Johnson's email was a scam. Later, he would decide it was his only lead.
When he made the decision to return to Florence, Bunce thought back to Johnson's email.
Soon he was on a direct overnight flight from Miami to Rome, followed by a train north to Florence. He had given himself less than a day and a half to find the missing bags.
He took his passport and his bag information, hoping security would allow him everywhere he needed to go.
After Bunce stressed he'd seen the luggage in a hangar, based on Johnson's email, airport crew members suggested that he take a look for himself.
They wrote an address on a piece of paper and instructed him to wait outside, near a service entrance at the back of the airport.
Around 45 minutes later, he was finally let into the hangar after passing through a metal detector.
There, he saw a vast field of scattered luggage. He described the space as a maze, estimating there were more than 2,000 unclaimed bags there.
"All this work, and I was just nervous we'd never know what truly happened to our bags," he said.
But, on the third round of combing through unclaimed luggage, after roughly four hours of searching, he saw his wife's black suitcase, and then his stepdaughter's pink bag standing next to it. He felt instant relief, and quickly snapped a photo to send to his family back home.
He also sent the same photo to Johnson. Among the many stray bags pictured, she was able to spot the red duffle bag that belonged to her daughter's best friend.
She felt especially guilty that the friend's baggage was lost, because it was her first time in Europe and the bag was full of souvenirs. Eventually, she told Bunce in an email, she returned to reclaim it.
When he arrived in Miami, bags in tow, Gwyneth waited for him with gifts, including a shirt with "Hero" printed on it.