FAIRMONT, Minn. - It won't fit him anymore, but a Gloucester man has his metal identity bracelet back after it was found inside a chicken gizzard in this southern Minnesota city - more than 25 years after he lost it in his grandfather's barn.
Aaron Giles, 31, lived in Fairmont as a child and played hide-and-seek and other games with his brothers in their grandfather's barn near Sherburn, Minn.
"I would spend most of my time out at his farm, and that's the only place I can think of that I would have lost it," Giles said yesterday, adding that he thinks it was lost when he was 4 or 5.
The barn was dismantled a few years ago, and the materials were used to build another barn in rural Elmore, Minn., about 45 miles east, he said. Giles thinks his bracelet was imbedded in the barn materials when they were moved.
Workers at Olson Locker in Fairmont were cutting the meat of chickens that came from an Elmore farm when one of them, Brittany McDonald, came across a shiny object in a chicken gizzard. McDonald, whose grandfather owns the locker, saw Aaron's name, address, and phone number engraved on it.
"It's the strangest story that I have ever heard in the meat locker business," said Mark Olson,
Olson tracked down Giles' father, Doug, who had moved to Arizona. Giles says he received his old bracelet in September.
