Jack Pearadin was already walking away when something golden made him stop and turn around.
It was a Sunday in January, and Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas was still covered in ice after a storm two days earlier. Jack, 35, was livestreaming on TikTok while processing a bucket of gravel that he and his friend Michael Schumacher had dug up weeks earlier. After checking four piles without finding anything, he turned around without knowing exactly why. About 8 feet away, a yellow glint caught his attention.
Michael, 43, had already returned to Wisconsin. He saw the find from hundreds of miles away, through the livestream. Weeks earlier, he had even joked with Jack about the possibility of finding a huge yellow diamond there, a perfect “canary”.
The stone weighed 6,03 carats, nearly the size of a fingernail, and the friends named it the Pearadin Schumacher American Dream Diamond. It is the fourth-largest yellow diamond found in the park since 1972.
Admission to the park costs 15 dollars, and its rules allow each visitor to keep any diamonds they find. Jack says some collectors told him it could be worth as much as one million dollars. However, an appraiser consulted by AP estimated that it could be worth around 250.000 dollars.
How much is it really worth? For now, nobody knows.