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CHICAGO (AP) – Anyone who has left as much as a hat on the Chicago Transit Authority train knows that everything that often leaves the station without its owner is gone forever.
Except apparently a $ 22,000 gold and silver flute.
Donald Rabin again holds – and plays – the flute that his grandmother left him that he forgot on a train seat when he started in the Logan Square area last week.
“I’m just thankful that I have the flute in my hand, that I can make music again and that I can make people smile,” said Rabin, a 23-year-old flute player in Boston.
Rabin took a Blue Line train from O’Hare International Airport before returning to Berklee College of Music in Boston. When he got off, he realized he had left his whistle behind.
He said he had been riding the train for hours hoping to find the whistle. When he arrived empty-handed, he reported the missing instrument to the police and went to social media to tell people what had happened.
According to the Chicago Tribune, a CNN reporter told Rabin that he was about to fly out of Chicago that there was a comment on Facebook about the whistle appearing in a pawn shop, that a homeless man had found it and used it as collateral. a loan of $ 550.
The owner of the pawn shop, Gabe Cocanate, was holding the whistle and trying to determine if it was as valuable as it looked when he and his wife saw the story of the missing whistle on the news.
When the homeless man returned to the store, “I’m going, ‘Listen man, it was all over the news. This is not your whistle, ‘Coconate told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Police picked up the whistle and contacted Rabin, who flew back to Chicago this week, tracked it down and treated officers to a brief concert.
Rabin knew the chance to ever see something so valuable again. And yet he said: “For some reason I knew in my heart and soul that it would be found. I knew my grandmother would never leave me. ”