Just a nice follow-up on a bike the SBR recovered last week:
Our Burley Rivazza tandem was stolen on Thanksgiving Day, 2009 from our garage .. It was lifted off its rack, up and over two cars and carried out of the garage...while we were home, and having been in and out of the garage all day. We did everything we could to find it... searching eBay, craigslist, pawn shops and distributing flyers...but hope was fading for finding the bicycle.
The Lansing Police Department recovered the bicycle ten months later, and looked up the serial number in the crime computer. Finding nothing, LPD was going to send it to public salvage auction the very next day. On a hunch, an LPD evidence and property officer Googled the serial number and make of the bicycle and immediately found the listing on the stolenbicycleregistry.com.
After a few e-mails and phone calls, we were reunited with the bicycle, almost exactly ten months later. As it turned out, the serial number of the bicycle was never entered into the crime computer when the original East Lansing Police Department report was filed. So the bicycle never showed in the statewide inventory of stolen property, and woud have come back "clean" if the bike was fenced at a pawn shop.
Some things I tell people now:
1) Register your stolen bicycle IMMEDIATELY on stolenbicycleregistry.com
2) Keep your garage door closed and locked
3) Lock your bicycles with a sturdy lock to a fixed object, even inside your locked garage
4) Be proactive about finding your bicycle and use google alerts and search agents. Make it easy to locate you
5) Put some kind of identification on your bicycle, such as an engraved driver's license number, a note inside the seat tube, or an reward/ID label from stuffbak.com
Thanks you stolenbicycleregistry.com and the Lansing Police Department!
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