Buying your first car is a memory that forever sticks in the brain — especially if that happy glow is short-lived when someone steals it. A California woman who bought her very first car back in 1985 with a little help from her late father only to have it stolen a year later after is celebrating now after finally reuniting with her green 1967 Mustang after 28 years apart.

One major problem in finding stolen cars? Usually whoever swipes them is not inclined to go ahead and then register that vehicle with the department of motor vehicles, you know, because it’s stolen.

But in this case, a man who’d had the car for the last 23 years says he decided to finally bring it in to get registered, reports The Monterey Herald, and it came up as a stolen vehicle.

“It had been out of the system for so long that it came back with no file. All of the files for the vehicle had been purged,” a California Highway Patrol officer explained. “The officer did some digging and found out the car was stolen in 1986 from Salinas.”

The man who tried to register it said he’d bought it from a storage facility and had been working on it for the last two decades, before deciding it was time to register it. Officers are looking into whether he knew it was stolen.

“I never thought I would see it again,” the owner said. “It’s like winning the lottery. It happens to very few people and for it to happen to me, it’s just an amazing feeling.”

After 28 years, a woman and prized Mustang reunite [Monterey Herald]

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