Any damage to the rim?
Years ago I bought a VW that came with BBS rims. The one in the trunk had a hole in the barrel of the rim, likely from hitting something similar. Maybe the fact you had 35s on saved the rim.
The sad part is, the idiot driving around with the missing brake pad doesn't even know it is gone, from the looks of that backing plate they've been metal-to-metal for quite a while. There's a reddit site called justrolledintotheshop
www.reddit.com/r/justrolledintotheshop where you see stuff like that all the time.