In June 2018, Erica Bennett dropped her iPhone in South Carolina's Edisto River, and she had lost all hope of retrieving it. "We got done with the river float and gathered all of our belongings up and it just fell and we didn't notice it fell into the water," she explained to ABC affiliate WCIV. The phone was in a waterproof case at the time, but her husband wasn't able to recover it despite his best efforts. Now, 15 months later, she's finally gotten her phone back.
YouTuber Michael Bennett, in a remarkable video, managed to recover the phone when he was diving for hidden treasures. Still in its waterproof case, he took the phone and was surprised to find that it still worked after he charged it up at home. "That thing had like black erosion all over it. It had been there for a long time," he explained. In order to track down who the iPhone belonged to, he took out the sim card and went through the contacts in order to reach Bennett.
After he tracked her down, he was able to give her back the phone, which contained text messages from her late father. "It was kind of emotional because the last thing I have from him is saying, ‘Hey I’m playing phone tag with you, so I just figured I just text you, how are you feeling?’ And I think he had called me after that," she said. "I’m pretty sure it was Father’s Day."
Check out Michael Bennett's video in which he discovered the phone above.
