Ten thousand years (and more) of human evolution, and we end up like this.
Drug addicts are not known for getting fair value when reselling stolen goods.
I inherited my dad’s Mercury Dime collection from the 1940’s. He spent years collecting. He would buy rolls of dimes at the bank and go through them. Turn them in and buy another roll. Dad did the same thing decades letter collecting bicentennial quarters
They were mounted in a book with cardboard sleeves labeled by year. He left it at his parents when he joined the Navy.
Some relatives kids found it and bought candy bars.
I look at the gaps in the collection now and shake my head. Mercury dimes are hard to find today.
It’s the work and passion my dad put into collecting that matters. Not the dollar value.
You might feel differently about that if you were addicted to crack.
In one of the more extreme instances of this, John Mulaney bought a watch for $12,000 on his credit card and immediately sold it for $6,000 cash to support his habit (and also misplaced half of that cash).
It’s not just the druggies to blame. The scrapyards are much too happy for the business.
You can imagine the cost to repair a car after the catalytic convertor is sliced off.
https://www.cars.com/articles/whats-a-catalytic-converter-and-why-do-people-steal-them-446861/
It takes longer to steal the wheels off a car.
Link Catalytic Converter Theft Is Still Big Business. Here’s How To Prevent It
Much, much worse is the cost of a human life. Remember the death of actor Johnny Wactor?
This story is from 2019.
Is there a chance the coins can be recovered?
Maybe, if the Coinstar machines hadn’t been emptied.
I’ve seen a Tech servicing the machine when I was shopping.
It would be a chore sorting through all those coins.
As @ekedolphin mentioned this story was from 2019–so it is much too late to recover any coins.
I didn’t notice the date.
Maybe something was recovered right after the man was arrested. But, it’s unlikely.
Here’s a modification to the coin machines that might be useful. Improve the imaging or detection facilities in the machine (or at a post-gathering facility) to detect specific coins from a supplied list of valuable ones.
I wonder how many would have to be checked to be profitable.
My sister worked for a while, in high school, at a popular local cafeteria. Part of one person’s payment was a roll of nickels. Later she went to open it and found they were those steel nickels from the forties. She kept the roll and put her own two bucks in the register.