Two hundred and fourteen dollars of a child’s own money, accumulated across four years in a mint tin.

Two hundred and nine dollars and eighty-five cents, burned, on a fifteen per cent restocking fee on a chair that was in a family’s house for forty-eight hours and could not be used.

That is the only thing the entire exercise actually bought.

Eleven weeks of a professional standards investigation, a written reprimand retained for twenty-four months, and a specialist post in a youth engagement unit that went to somebody else in the February of 2024.

Dustin Vandermolen, thirty-one, two children, four and a half years behind a counter: a dismissal, a dismissed felony, a misdemeanour conviction, eighteen months of probation, a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine, forty hours of community service, and a permanent bar from the only trade he has ever had.