It wasn’t supposed to end up in Hamburg, New York.

But there it was — a 75th anniversary Cobb County Police Department challenge coin, buried among a handful of local keepsakes in a plastic bag at a garage sale just south of Buffalo. Most were tied to nearby towns. This one wasn’t. It didn’t belong. And that’s what made it worth noticing.

Kevin Banks, a retired man with a habit of weekend garage-sale hopping, paid a dollar for the whole bag. “A few weeks back,” he wrote in a letter addressed to Lt. McCloskey of the Cobb County Police Department, “I found a small bag of commemorative coins (mostly local), but this one stuck out.”

It was struck in 1999 to mark 75 years of the department’s history. Eagle on the front. Cobb County Police across the bottom. The kind of challenge coin typical

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