Anonymous stranger helped return phone to Gilford woman

GILFORD — A stranger’s act of generosity saved a Gilford woman from going into a panic over a lost phone on Wednesday night.

Sharon Littizzio said she had taken a friend, who has a medical condition, shopping at Wal-Mart late on Wednesday afternoon, then brought the friend home and returned to her own home to prepare dinner for her family. About an hour and a half after her Wal-Mart trip, her adult son, who lives with her and her husband on Sanborn Road, asked her if she was missing her phone.

She was, she just didn’t know it yet.

The last time she could remember using her phone, a Samsung Galaxy S3, was when she was waiting in the checkout line and pulled her phone out to check the time. She then slipped it back into her coat pocket, but didn’t close the zipper, she said. The phone, which she doesn’t lock, must have fallen out of her pocket somewhere between the register and her car in the parking lot, because someone picked the phone up and, Littizzio has concluded, must have opened her “Contacts” application, which would have told the person the name on the phone.

Her call history suggests that the person then scrolled through her contacts and tried calling all of the people who share her last name. They called her son-in-law in Florida, then her daughter, and then, lastly, her grandson, who attends an after-school program at the Boys and Girls Club in Laconia, who answered the call.

That was already going above and beyond what a stranger would have to do. Some people would have walked past the phone and not even bothered to pick it up. The most that Littizzio expected was that someone would leave the phone at the customer service desk. It turns out, the helpful stranger went several steps further, and drove the phone to the Boys and Girls Club so that it could be given to her grandson, who called his dad – Littizzio’s son – who went to pick up the phone and return it to its rightful owner.

“I am a very religious person, I think God orchestrated that so I wouldn’t panic and it was returned to me with no anxiety,” Littizzio said.

If the person hadn’t done what he or she had done, it would have resulted in “chaos,” Littizzio said.

Her friend – the woman she went shopping with on Wednesday – suffers from occasional falls, and Littizzio is her first emergency contact. If she were to lose her phone, she wouldn’t know how to call her friend to check on her. If she had noticed that her phone was missing, she said she would have raced back to Wal-Mart and combed the parking lot and aisles in a panicked search.

Now, Littizzio said, she just wants the person who helped her to know that his or her efforts were greatly appreciated.

“I’m just grateful that there are honest people in the world, and that whoever did this took the time of getting the phone back to me,” she said. “Somebody went way out of their way. I’m just very, very grateful.”