Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Stolen bike recovery story

The players:
  • Joe, a cop who's also a Cat 3 road racer and Cat B Cyclocross racer.
  • Brigitte, a racer who commutes on a $7000 Serotta.
  • Mr. Pudge, a ratty overweight dirtbag in sneakers who stole Brigitte's bike right off of the light rail train.
  • Matthew, the guy who saw Brigitte's bike at a Wells Fargo ATM and snapped a photo of Mr. Pudge with the bike.
Sgt. Joe got the ATM transaction information from Wells Fargo, got his address from the DMV, gave Mr. Pudge a visit and retrieved the bike. Read the whole story at Velo Review.

Finally, Sgt Joe's tips on identifying stolen bikes:
  • Someone riding a bike that has clipless pedals wearing tennis shoes.
  • A tweeker riding a custom titanium Serotta cross bike.
  • Joshua Hutchens of Cyclepath has a good tactic of yelling “Hey that’s my bike” and seeing if the guy takes off running. We call that a clue.
And I call that good detective work.

7 comments:

  1. Good story, but I ride on clipless pedals with street shoes pretty often. I hope that doesn't make me a suspect.

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  2. Yeah, I think I'd also fall victim to profiling.

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  3. We should get a bunch of cycling blogs to start a collection for this cop, maybe an unofficial reward or something.

    Talk about an awesome cop.

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  4. What are the odds on conviction? Receiving stolen goods--pretty good. Bike theft (in this case grand larceny)--very poor.

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  5. ...this is like a love story, only better...
    ...major props to the very astute matthew, who's heads up move was the first step in getting this ball rolling & to officer santos, who's diligence, knowledge of procedure & maybe an understanding of just how important that bike was to brigette, brought this tale to a happy ending...

    ...hey, fritz, thats my bike !!!...
    ...sorry, just checkin'...

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  6. ..."who's" should be "whose" but you knew that when you read it...

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  7. Whose who's, peddle pedals, their they're, it's its all the same.

    And yeah, that cop did good.

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