'I feel human now': Homeless man returns $4000 ring given to him by mistake. Now he is $190,000 richer

In 2013, Billy Ray Harris was homeless, spending his days on a street corner in Kansas City, asking passersby for a few coins. But everything changed when a stranger dropped something unexpected into his cup. "I was just sitting here like I am today. She walked up. She had a little coin purse with a zipper on it, and she unzipped it and just dumped all the coins in it. I guess not knowing that the ring was inside," Harris told local news outlet WPRI.

That ring turned out to be Sarah Darling’s engagement ring, which she didn’t realize was gone until she was far from the city. "Later, when Harris noticed the ring, curiosity led him to a jeweler, who confirmed it was real. "My jaw dropped like that cartoon fox on Road Runner. You know, $4,000 — you're sleeping under a bridge. And then the other little angel is like, 'Man, don’t do that. Your grandfather turned over in his grave. You know, you sold out for that money like that,'" he recalled. While he did not sell it, Harris held onto the ring. Darling returned the next day, not knowing if he’d still be there.

"I just pulled up my car and got out really quickly and ran up to him and I’m like, 'I don’t know if you remember me, but I gave you something that was really precious to me.' And he’s like, 'Was it a ring?' And I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'I have it,'" she said. Darling and her husband, Bill Krejci, were so moved by Harris’s honesty that they shared his story online and started a donation fund. "We set a goal for a thousand dollars because a lot of people who had been touched by the story expressed interest in helping Billy Ray," she told Today. The fund quickly took off and raised over $190,000 in just three months.

"That tells me that someone higher than us is in control of all of this, and he's trying to deliver a message, and he's just using me as a vessel and he's giving me a platform to do it," Harris said. The money changed his life — with help from a lawyer, Harris put it into a trust, bought a car, and put a down payment on a house, which he’s now fixing up himself. It also led to something even bigger. Harris reconnected with his sister and brother in Texas after 16 years apart, during which they had believed he was dead. "I am not trying to say that I am no saint, but I am no devil either. When I think of the past, I think, thank God that it's over. I feel human now," he told Today.

Reflecting on the incident, Darling said, "I’ve talked to other mothers about this. It gives [other moms] a real, tangible story of really teaching kind of the difference between what’s wrong and what’s right." Krejci and Darling have taken Harris to six Kansas City Royals games, and every time, the team won. "I want to thank all the people who helped me out. I want them to see where all their efforts, blessings, and kindness are going," Harris said. While Harris found a home, stability, and a second chance, hundreds of thousands of others remain without one. According to a 2024 HUD report, approximately 770,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2024 — an all‑time high and an 18% increase from the previous year. Veterans were the only population steadily seeing a decrease in homelessness, owing to continued government funding. The report also showed the highest to-date numbers of 'chronic homelessness', where a person with a debilitating disability is in a state of complete helplessness for over a year. "The rise in homelessness in 2024 can be attributed to the nation’s worsening shortage of affordable housing, stagnant wages that have not kept up with increased housing costs, the effects of increased inflation over the past few years, and the ending of many pandemic-era benefits and protections that helped keep individual and families stable housed," reported the National Low Income Housing Coalition.