It is, of course, the little things in life that too often get overlooked. What seems inconsequential to one person can prove life-affirming to another.
But how can you know? How do you sort such wheat from chaff? Maybe the story of Debbie Hoyt provides one or two clues.
Her life, by her own admission, has been miserable for more than two years. She is 62, lives in Golden and makes a living cleaning offices. She doesn’t mind it so much, she says.
On Jan. 9, 2008, her 31-year-old son, Criss, killed himself.
She doesn’t speak in detail about him, what he did, where his life was when he made that decision and, certainly, not a word of how he did it.
But she misses him. Every day is a heartbreaker. Mother’s Day, there have been two since, is virtually unbearable.
And then, last Tuesday arrived.
Debbie Hoyt abhors Jan. 9. Terrible and weird things happen. Her oven goes on the blink for no good reason. As she rolls out pie dough, her marble board shatters into bits. She is not that strong, she says.
On Jan. 9, 2009, it was her boyfriend’s birthday. They were going to dinner. Along with his presents and other things, she brought her camera. When she sat for dinner, the camera wasn’t there.
Gino DePalma started his job as an evidence clerk with the Golden Police Department at about the same time. He had been an officer in Boulder for 12 years until he was disabled. His job in Golden was to clean out the evidence lockers. They were overflowing.
The camera was already there on his first day. He would get to it, he thought. It sat for better than a year until he picked it up again.
It was loaded with photographs, more than 600 in all. There were pictures of a young man, of a funeral, of myriad things.
He loaded its memory card into his computer and began flipping through photos searching for a clue.
And there it was: A young man stood next to a brown sedan. He jotted down its license number and had it run through the department’s computer files.
“In cases like these,” DePalma said, “it is often just a game of roulette. What will be the identifier?”
The license plate on the sedan came back to a house just up Washington Street.
Debbie Hoyt had long ago given up the camera for gone. She had kicked herself for not downloading its contents.
The last pictures of Criss were in it.
“He was my baby,” she said softly.
“Did you lose something?” DePalma asked when she picked up the phone Tuesday. Debbie Hoyt cried when she figured it out.
Someone found the camera lying outside her home that January and kept it for a few days before taking it to the Police Department, which is five blocks from Hoyt’s home.
“I would really like to know who found it,” she said. “It is such a good thing that has happened to me. My greatest hope is I can thank them.”
There was no paperwork attached to the camera saying who turned it in, DePalma said.
“She was just a phenomenal woman, so thankful when she came in,” he said.
“I am just so glad I could be of help and do that for her.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
