I'm not sure off the top of my head if MacOS was encrypting the drive at that time, but you might try plugging the drive into FTK Imager or Autopsy. I believe both of these tools will do some data carving.
But before you do that, make sure the issue isn't the hard drive itself. If the hard drive is damaged, you may still be able to recover data, but it'll need to be done by someone who knows what they are doing. If the drive is spinning irregularly, or clicking, or not recognized by another system you might have issues.
Source - I used to work in a digital forensics lab.
Wow, my guess was since it was 2011, they would've still been using an old-fashioned spinning disk or probably an SSD with that form factor and normal SATA connection, but they were already using M.2 SSD, but a Frankenstein one where an adapter is needed:
But before you do that, make sure the issue isn't the hard drive itself. If the hard drive is damaged, you may still be able to recover data, but it'll need to be done by someone who knows what they are doing. If the drive is spinning irregularly, or clicking, or not recognized by another system you might have issues.
Source - I used to work in a digital forensics lab.