Georgia family overwhelmed by kindness of Beaufort after bag of toy trains go missing
By Delayna Earley
The Island News
What was meant to be a quick stress-relieving family vacation to the beach over Father’s Day turned into a lesson in patience, community and the kindness of strangers for one Georgia family as they searched for a very special lost bag of trains.
Heather Tinnerello, of Dallas, Ga., made a last-minute decision to book a room in Beaufort so that she and her family could get away for a few days and visit the beach over the Father’s Day weekend.
She, along with her husband, Thomas, and their 12-year-old autistic son, Thomas Jr., traveled the five hours to get to Beaufort with no real plans other than to go to the beach and play in their hotel’s pool.
Tinnerello and Thomas left the itinerary up to their son to decide upon, so in addition to enjoying the beach and the pool, their family also toured the areas with historic homes in downtown Beaufort as well as the Beaufort History Museum.
During their adventures in Beaufort, Thomas Jr. kept with him a red and black tool bag of small Thomas the Tank Engine model trains, a collection of comfort items that he has had since he was a toddler.
After several days of beach fun in Beaufort, the family packed up to head home and Tinnerello said she remembers telling Thomas Jr. to make sure he put his bag of trains on the cart so that it could be packed into the car.
Unfortunately, it was not until they got home to Georgia that her son came to her and said he thinks that he left his trains in Beaufort.
“He’s autistic and [autistic children] really gravitate toward like one or two things, and that’s like their thing,” Tinnerello said about the trains. “Thomas the Train, and trains in general, have just always been his thing and so as he was going through Pre-K and high-training and all those things you get rewards for, we would get him minis and use them as rewards.”
She called the hotel, which was the Comfort Suites near Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, and asked if anyone had seen the train bag while cleaning the room, but no one had turned it in.
After giving her contact information to the hotel in case the bag turned up, she started to think about other ways she could get the word out that this bag of important toys had gone missing and that is when she decided to make her first post in Beaufort’s “Buy, Sell, Trade” pages on Facebook.
From there, the posts went viral and spread faster than Tinnerello could have imagined, being shared by local citizens, organizations, businesses and even the City of Beaufort.
Tinnerello said that the number of people who reached out to her and shared stories of their own experiences with their autistic or neurodivergent children.
Meanwhile, Thomas Jr. was starting to accept that he might not get his trains back, as difficult as that was for him, according to Tinnerello.
“He draws them, and that’s just his obsession,” Tinnerello said. “They’re like his right arm. Because he’s had a hard time making friends, he actually learned facial expressions from the different trains and recognized those facial expressions through people.”
The outpouring of caring that the Thomas Jr. and his family got after their posts went viral are, in Tinnerello’s opinion, part of what helped Thomas accept that his trains might be gone for good.
“The biggest takeaway was, for my son, that people are good,” said Tinnerello. “There are people that are good who want to help you out and he was just blown away.”
At one point, Thomas Jr. said to his mother, “Mommy, these people don’t even know me,” and she responded to him by saying, “You’re right, they don’t know you, and they don’t know what we’re going through, but they want to help you.”
Tinnerello said that for her, she sees this as “God taking a turbulent time” in their lives and “through something that could have been way worse than it was, showing us his live through these circumstances and all the stories.”
At one point, people started to contact her asking if they could send her son new trains, or trains that their own children had loved and played with to replace his missing ones. She said she received countless messages from people wanting to help replace what her son had lost in that bag, knowing it was more than just a bag of trains for Thomas Jr.
She said one mom who also has a child who is autistic, said her son went through his own trains and said he wanted “to give them to the boy who doesn’t have trains.”
“I think what really spoke to me too, is all the autism moms – because when you’re a special needs mom or family you have a lot of shame or guilt – and all these moms came out in the posts and they were like, we get it. We know because you’ve been around these kids and they already have enough to go through and then something like this happens, it is hard,” said Tinnerello.
Tinnerello said that she almost didn’t post about the bag of trains because she was so scared of people judging her because she was so concerned with locating a “bag of stupid trains that are just stupid toys.”
The trains were missing for almost a month before Tinnerello received a phone call from the Beaufort hotel they stayed at letting her know that they had been located. The bag of trains were in a closet in the hotel.
Due to the trains being in a tool bag, someone apparently assumed that the bag was full of tools and put it in a closet out of the way.
A woman who works for UPS reached out to Tinnerello and said that they would be happy to ship the trains to her. After Tinnerello received updates and photos of each transition period when the bag was picked up, it arrived at their home in early July in a box that was decorated and signed by all of the employees from the UPS store.
“My son was so excited to get his trains back,” Tinnerello said. “He sat with them the rest of the night, he would not let them move out of his sight.”
While the story ended up being a happy one with her son being reunited with his trains, Tinnerello said this experience has ended up being so much more than that for her and her family.
“God’s out there, God’s got this, you know,” Tinnerello said. “I don’t know what the plan is right now, but I can trust him, and that’s what I got from this.”
Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
