Baby tooth found in Friend city bill payment, nobody sure whose it is

FRIEND, NE — Shana Glover has lived in Friend for 11 years. When it’s time to pay her city utility bill she writes a check, puts it in an envelope, seals it and drops it off at the city hall depository.

Not once has there been an issue. That’s why she was surprised last week to get a voicemail asking her to call city hall about her bill.

“She said, ‘I opened up your bill today and I found a tooth.’ And I said, ‘What, a real tooth?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, a real tooth.’”

The next question. Does the tooth fairy need this back?

Glover’s 11-year-old son hadn’t mentioned losing one, so she asked his group of friends.

“‘We’re not sure whose tooth it could be.’ Then they started naming off all their classmates who lost a tooth - that they remembered - in the last couple of weeks,” Glover said. “Nobody really knew for sure who lost the tooth.”

Glover posted a photo of the tooth to the popular Nebraska Through the Lens Facebook group… and it took off. Many commenters were impressed the city’s deputy clerk, Mallory Erwin, made the effort to call. She says she wanted to make sure a family wasn’t missing a keepsake.

“Instead of just throwing it in the trash, I thought it was (maybe) something she wanted to keep and have later,” Erwin said. “People keep their baby hair too, so I thought it would be a courtesy thing to at least call her and ask what she would like me to do with it.”

Glover hasn’t cracked the case yet, but thinks the tooth came from school, where they put teeth in envelopes to send home if a student loses one.

“It amazes me that it went from school, into his book bag, and then into my envelopes and somehow got to the city,” Glover said. “It just amazes me. It was meant to be a story.”

Further complicating efforts to solve the mystery, once her son’s friends found out the tooth was gaining fame, they all started to claim it as their own.

Who knows if we’ll ever know the true owner of the tooth, but we do know that next time Glover pays her bill, she’ll be checking the envelope twice.

Several commenters suggested there was a cap on the tooth, but Glover wants to set the record straight: the bottom part just has dried blood on it.