I’m happy to report that over the weekend, the vigilance and awareness of the bike community scored yet another victory over bike thieves.
On Saturday, Carl Larson noticed a nice Blue Schwinn Homegrown mountain bike in front of Red Light Clothing Exchange in downtown Portland. The bike looked very similar to a Stolen Bike Listing he had just read about. Carl didn’t have a lock with him, and he wasn’t near a computer to notify the victim, so he ran over to the downtown Bike Gallery and double-checked the listing online with Assistant Manager Mike Hilbrandt. When they realized it was indeed the stolen bike, Mike ran back to lock it up…but it was gone!
Mike said:
“This really bothered me, so a couple of hours later, when I got off work, I went back to see if it had returned. Sure enough, there was some 50+ year old man standing outside of the hotel across the street of The Red Light with it. I jumped out of the car and took it from him stating that “This bike is stolen.” He immediately grew very apologetic and congratulated me for recovering it. According to him, he bought it off of some young Hispanic man earlier that day for $17. Whatever. I took the bike, stored it at the shop, then went home and emailed Kurt (the victim) with the good news.”
And here’s what Kurt had to say:
“Thank you so much. I have been sick since it was stolen, and the police told me that it would never be recovered. They weren’t counting on people like you. I can’t thank you enough.”
I love helping people get their stolen bikes back. You can help too by keeping your eyes peeled and checking the Stolen Bike Listings every few days. Or, if you’d like to get a weekly email digest of all the stolen bikes listings, you can join 70 others on the Stolen Bike Digest.
Amazingly, as some astute readers have pointed out, this is the second bike Mike has recovered. Here’s the first one.