How to Deal with a recreated AD User Object and their lost email?

I am in a bind. Three Users somehow got deleted from AD. In a panic, I recreated one of the users and gave that user the same email address thinking that if it was going to overwrite anything or mess with the already existing address that it would error out or I would at least get some kind of warning. The other two users I was able to use AdRestore and repopulate their attributes and they were able to get back into their accounts and see their emails. I have two things that I want to try but I don't know what's going to work and I'm trying to prevent this recreated user's email from being lost for good. Here are details on the scenario:

Exchange/Server 2003

In ESM, I can still see the mailbox, but it shows as disconnected. Here it shows as being around 1.5GB. When I try to reconnect the mailbox, I don't see the recreated User as being an option.

When I tried ExMerge, I can see the recreated User's mailbox, but it's about 4MB, which I'm assuming is the new mailbox of the same name.

My retention policy is 30 days. It's been about 20 hours since this happened.

I want to try two things:

Use AdRestore to get the old account back and repopulate the attributes like I did successfully with the other two. If I do this, what will happen to the recreated account?

OR, should I reconnect the mailbox to a different user entirely and convert the mail to a pst file and restore it back to the recreated user that way?

Am I screwed here?