Indianapolis came together to retrieve bride's stolen wedding dress

Jessica and Jake Blackwell were just planning ahead. They were going to take Jessica’s bridal gown, a little muddied from their August wedding, to the cleaners, so they put it in the trunk of Jake’s car on Sunday night. But the next morning it was gone, along with an old blanket, a pair of gloves, a couple packs of gum, and half a can of Red Bull.

Jake “woke me up and said, ‘You need to get up. I need to call the police. My car has been broken into, and your dress is gone,” Jessica tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I just laid there for a second. I thought that I was dreaming.”

Jessica had planned on preserving the sparkly, blush mermaid-style gown from Morilee, along with her mother-in-law’s veil, in a shadow box to display when the couple bought their first home, maybe passing it down to a future daughter one day. The police came to their Indianapolis neighborhood and said they would start an investigation, but they didn’t give the Blackwells much hope that anything could be done.

Rather than sit around waiting, Jessica did what many of us would: She posted about it on Facebook. She made the post public, in case some friends wanted to share it. But she most certainly didn’t expect her story to go viral.

“I set my phone down and I picked it back up, and it had been shared 50-60 times,” she says. “I had messages coming from news reporters and strangers with leads. It just kind of blew up.”

Readers posted it to Facebook groups for local brides and secondhand marketplaces. Two local stations covered the story, and it became a cause célèbre within a day.

“People were outraged, especially older women on Facebook,” Jessica marvels. “They were so angry, you would have thought whoever it was stole directly from them.”

Even Jessica’s sister in California heard about the story from a co-worker. “I feel absolutely terrible, because she’s actually in the [path] of the fires that are going on out there. If anybody should be having media attention, it should probably be them.”

Unlike so many stories in the news, however, in this case, the coverage actually worked. By Tuesday, Jessica received a text from an anonymous man who said he’d bought the dress from a couple.

“He said they were going through hard times, and they were on their way out of town” and that “they just got married and they asked him if he wanted to buy it. He said he bought it for $250 because he thought he could sell it for more. It was a really sketchy conversation.”

Jessica didn’t know whether she believed the man, but she wanted her dress back. She doesn’t think it would have sold for much secondhand anyway, and she’s quite certain that all the attention made it pretty much impossible to unload. She and Jake met the man at the police station and retrieved her gown.

The whole experience has left her feeling very grateful to her community in Indianapolis, from those outraged older women to the owners of local consignment shops who promised to look out for her gown.

“I never in a million years expected the people of the south side of Indy to come together and actively help me,” she says. “It was a very supportive situation.”

And while more than one dry cleaner in the area has offered to clean her returned gown for free, she’s decided to keep it in her living room for a little while after it’s grand adventure.

“I just like keeping an eye on it,” she says.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• Texas woman blows up her wedding dress to celebrate the end of her 14-year marriage

• Newlyweds’ car mishap on the way to their wedding reception leads to incredible photo opportunity

• Dave Chappelle photobombs engagement shoot after learning the groom-to-be is in the Air Force

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