A family has received their father’s Purple Heart, three decades after he died thanks to a thrift store volunteer.

Two weeks ago a woman came into the Christian Family thrift store in Phoenix, Arizona with an unusual find. She recently bought and deconstructed a box from the store finding multiple military awards hidden inside. One of the awards included a Purple Heart medal which is only presented to service members who have been wounded or killed in the line of duty. Teresa Ferrin, who was volunteering at the time knew she had to track down the owner.

Ferrin inspected the medal and found the name Erik Karl Blauberg on the back. After some sleuthing, she found out that Blauberg died in 1988 at the age of 58 and received the medal after serving in the Korean war. Ferrin then turned her goal into finding Blauberg’s loved ones.

“I just felt it needed to go to the family, and I was going to try to find the family,” Ferrin told Fox News.

Ferrin was able to get in touch with Blauberg’s eight estranged children. 

When Ferrin sent the Purple Heart and military awards to Blauberg’s family, Lisa Walker, his daughter described the gesture as “bittersweet.”

“This is one of the only things that we have of his,” Walker told Fox News. “I’m very grateful to Teresa. We didn’t even know he had a Purple Heart. I knew, and my brothers knew that he had medals, but we didn’t know he had a Purple Heart, so that was very shocking.”