It should’ve been lost forever, crushed in a car shredder. But this World War II Purple Heart refused to be forgotten.
JONESBURG, Mo. — Tossed inside a scrap car and nearly destroyed, a World War II Purple Heart defied the odds — surviving steel, time and memory to find its way home.
At Scrap Mart Metals in Jonesburg, Missouri, where 14,000 tons of twisted metal are shredded, sorted and forgotten each month, one small medal refused to disappear.
“When you shred a car,” said owner Lucas Kendall, “a car will come out in tiny little pieces in 90 seconds.”
But one recent day, something didn’t shred. And something wasn’t forgotten.
Among the debris, picker Patrick Bloom noticed something unusual: a glint of gold and purple on the conveyor belt.
“The purple stood out the most,” Bloom said. “It stuck out like a sore thumb.”
What he pulled from the rubble was a World War II Purple Heart. Completely intact, ribbon and all.
“We get coins through this thing ’cause cars have coins in them, and they’re unrecognizable,” said Kendall. “Quarters are bent in half and this thing’s completely whole. The ribbon’s still on.”
That unlikely survivor — a small, sacred symbol of sacrifice — sparked a mission to find its rightful owner.
Kendall and his staff turned detective, diving into family history on Ancestry.com. After building out the soldier’s family tree, they found Katie Krietemeyer, a teacher in Wentzville, Missouri.
“He told me that it had gone through the scrapper and that it had survived when things like coins and other things hadn’t survived,” Krietemeyer recalled. “I couldn’t believe it.”
The Purple Heart belonged to Charles Joseph Hall, who died in 1945 while fighting in Europe. Hall was more than a distant relative; he had grown up in the same house as Krietemeyer’s grandmother.
Krietemeyer’s father, Joe Turner, was named after him.
“He enlisted right out of high school and wanted to be a paratrooper,” Turner said. “But they moved him to infantry and he went to Europe and was killed six months later.”
The family knew the medal existed, but it had been missing for years.
“My mom lived in Warren County and she had a car in her driveway that was no longer drivable,” Turner explained. “She sold it to a guy in the little town she lived by, at the garage, for spare parts and scrap.”
Unknowingly, the Purple Heart went with the car — and into the shredder.
Rather than simply returning the medal in the mail, Scrap Mart wanted to do something more.
The company flew Krietemeyer and her dad to San Diego to attend the national convention of their scrap metal association, where the medal was returned in front of hundreds of attendees.
“We were treated like celebrities,” Krietemeyer said. “People were coming up to us and wanting to meet us and take pictures of the medal. … For them to make this big deal out of it, it was really cool.”
Now, the Purple Heart is finally back where it belongs.
“We wouldn’t have this if it weren’t for the kindness of complete strangers,” Krietemeyer said.
In a scrapyard full of shattered parts, one small medal held on — not just through steel, but through time — waiting to finally come home.
“I think it was definitely meant to be,” said Kendall.