Facebook Rallying to Help Mom Find 'Most Valuable Thing I Own'
When she lost “the closest thing” she had to her son Jarrett, 8, killed four years ago by a drunk driver, Michelle Mantanona (shown here with her husband Matthew and son Jonny, 7) turned to Facebook to try and track it down — only to find something else that surprised her in the nicest way. (Photo: Michelle Ann Rottet Mantanona/Facebook).
UPDATE: Michelle Mantanona can sleep soundly again — the missing quilt has been located in a janitor’s closet at the airport. “I’m happy to announce that the Orlando Police Department contacted us this morning to inform us Jarrett’s Quilt has been found,” Mantanona wrote on Facebook Thursday, sharing her relief. “We would like to thank everyone for the support…Thanks for making our family feel so blessed.”
After her 8-year-old son Jarrett was killed by a drunk driver in May 2011, Michelle Mantanona found solace remembering him with a quilt that she fashioned from his old t-shirts.
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“It’s the most valuable thing I think I own,” the mother — who has slept with her arms around the blanket each night for the past three years — told WOFL FOX 35 Orlando of the quilt. "I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. I didn’t get to hold him…[so] that quilt was my comfort object…That’s the closest thing I have to him.”
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(Photo: Michelle Ann Rottet Mantanona/Facebook)
But in a heartbreaking turn of events, the Abilene, Texas family lost that keepsake on Friday at the Orlando International Airport on their way to SeaWorld Orlando and Disney World with their surviving son, 7-year-old Jonny, to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Jarrett’s death.
“Our family was on our way to Sea World when my son was killed,” Mantanona tells Yahoo Parenting. “So just the thought of making this trip was upsetting for me until now. But Jonny was getting older and I realized that we were preventing him from having these vital childhood experiences out of grief which wasn’t fair to him.” So off they went.
(Photo: Michelle Ann Rottet Mantanona/Facebook)
And all was well — until they realized that the quilt had vanished. “Once we got back into the room and settled in for bed I started looking through our bags for my blanket and that’s when I realized it was missing,” she says. “I cried myself to sleep ‘till about 3 a.m..”
Airport security cameras caught the last time the family had the quilt. (Photo: Michelle Ann Rottet Mantanona/Facebook)
Turning to Facebook a couple of days later, the family asked friends to share a photo of the quilt with their story in hope of tracking it down. Since then, the plea has not only been relayed in local Florida news (where their story has been shared more than 230,000 times), it’s been tackled by Orlando police (who have joined in the hunt and shared a security camera shot of the family’s last documented moment with the blanket) and elicited a slew of supportive comments from people they’ve never even met.
“Going to Sea World was a way of coming full circle and finishing the trip we never got to take because of the crash, so as you can imagine, it was an emotional day,” says Mantanona of the sad start to their vacation, since transformed thanks to the kindness of strangers online. “We are beyond shocked that so many people have reached out.”
(Photo: Jarrett’s Law/Facebook).
The mother reveals, though, that Jarrett wouldn’t have been surprised by all the attention. “If you knew him you would understand,” says Mantanona, who has been working with Texas state representative Susan King on “Jarrett’s Law,” proposed legislation to change the laws regarding the sale of alcohol to minors in the wake of the boy’s death at the hands of an underage drunk driver. “He was a force of nature. In fact, one of the patches on the quilt reads, ‘They’ll make a movie about me one day.’”
(Photo: Jarrett’s Law/Facebook).
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