How I got my STOLEN ebike back

my e-bike was stolen and my Apple Air tag said the bike was taken to a specific house on this street find out how I get my bike back and how the police nearly screwed the whole thing up welcome to the channel I'm Liz and I have a doozy of a video for you today I'm standing here in St George Utah pretty close to the scene of the crime where I got my bike stolen what was stolen was a Juiced rip current s step through it's a 2500 e-bike I have had it for six months and have over 1300 miles on it in fact I wrote it from Pittsburgh to DC I love this bike it can go anywhere but obviously it is a hot property people will break locks they will take risks to steal this bike so the crime scene is right here at the Marriott Courtyard in St George now you know me most likely as a full-time rver I've been on the road for four years but I was in between campers so I needed to stay at a hotel for a few days I had my e-bike with me it was locked on the bike rack so what happened was the three nights I spent at the Marriott the first two I parked my bike on the side lot and I kept it covered now I was uncovering it one morning and a hotel employee walked by and she said hey you know you should just park it in the front we've got cameras and it'll be safer there so on my last night at the hotel I came back late it was around 8 30 I mean it was dark it wasn't super late and I parked right by the front door I was probably four spaces from the front door it was a brightly lit parking lot and as I'll explain later I'd kind of had a rough time of it the last few days so I thought well it'll be safe here and yes I left the bike uncovered but it was locked and again pretty much right outside the front door well the next morning I woke up and I just had a bad feeling 6 30 in the morning I went downstairs and I was just afraid to look but sure enough the thieves had broken the lock and the lock was a you know good luck around this bike and apparently the lock was not good enough right so I was devastated to find that my bike was gone and I walked back into the hotel I had the front desk call the police I explained it was gone they said a officer would be out in a little bit was about 6 30 in the morning and it took me about 15 minutes to remember that juice actually puts a special GPS tracker slot in their bikes and a GPS tracker will allow you to track anything and that is just a really great thing particularly for e-bikes so I looked on my phone and I found the exact address where my bike was and the last time it had been updated was 11 15 the night before I was like okay in my mind you know thieves are up late thieving and are probably sleeping in so it's probably going to be good it'll be there for a while I called the police back just to update them hoping I get the officer out sooner by saying hey I know the address so you know have them come out and you know let's get this done let's get this bike back well here's where the mistake happened about the time the officer showed up about an hour later I checked my phone and lo and behold the bike is on the Move I'm like what happened oh my gosh I speak to the officer the bike was three and a half miles away but it was in the next town it was in Washington Utah dispatch called a Washington Utah police officer who went to the door of the house where the bike was knocked on the door and said something like hey do you have an e-bike damn would you happen to have an e-bike here that maybe doesn't belong to you and you know they said no no we don't have it and the officer drove away and then these people panicked and they had to get rid of the bike the bike was now on the move I could tell by the tracker that it look like that it had stopped moving I now had a new address on the location finder and the cop said well that's a few miles away let me go check it out you stay here and I said no I need to follow you I need to be with you because the way the Apple Air tag works is if I'm close enough I can make that GPS tracker make a noise so if it's in a building or another house or whatever and the person denies no I don't have the e-bike I can push the button and it's going to go beep beep beep and they're going to be called out as a liar so the officer agrees to let me follow her she said when we get close to the location I'm going to ask you to pull over and wait I don't know if there's going to be any kind of situation so I'll have you wait you know maybe 100 feet away and I said fine so now we're headed over there so I really just don't know what they were thinking why they would just show up at a door and say hey do you have any stolen merchandise oh you don't all right fine thank you sorry for bothering you I mean that's what I figure must have happened I can't believe that they did that and why didn't they just wait and see what happened because clearly what happened was they got in the car and they took off with the bike we all have days where we miss a few things and we don't do it right and this was definitely one of them the number one mistake I made I think was I really believed that Bright Lights by the front door meant something that was a big learning to me to be just steps from the front door and that not being enough to stop a thief I believed and really trusted what the employee said that there were cameras turned out not to be cameras wouldn't have mattered if there were because if there were cameras this hotel is four stories high the cameras would have been on the roof going down would have just gotten tops of heads wouldn't have helped the next mistake was trusting the lock on the bike rack I had taken that bike uncovered to Walmart and to other stores and of course left it in the hotel parking lot overnight I thought that that lock was infallible this is a Hollywood racks bike rack it's called the RV Rider I love it I can load and unload the bike by myself which by the way weighs 65 pounds without the battery and 75 width and I really love that bike rack Evan the owner of the company explained that that lock is not meant to do that it's meant to protect the bike if you run into a gas station it is not meant for this kind of situation you need a hardened steel chain lock so I do have a link for that lock I do have the lock so I know your number one question is why didn't I just take it to my hotel room well you know I could have I was just in a rough spot you know I just wasn't firing on all cylinders I had broken up with my boyfriend just three days earlier I had then set a personal record and drove 750 miles in one day to buy a new camper the day the bike got stolen was my birthday so there was a lot going on and I thought hey if I'm parking it right by the front door in bright lights I don't even need to cover it it'll be fine do not leave a bike unattended in a hotel parking lot or really anywhere it should be covered it should have a hardened chain steel lock and preferably in your hotel room if you can so yeah I wasn't perfect but I wanted to make this video to help you these e-bikes it seems like people will stop at nothing to take them I got really lucky in that they didn't throw my bike in the river what they did was they drove it a few miles to an industrial park and just dumped it the damage to the bike fortunately was repairable apparently what happened was after the police knocked on the door and they left the thieves just panicked and they realized of course that there was a GPS tracker in there and they tried to get the battery off the bike they still wanted to keep the bike but let's get rid of the battery and they hacked and hacked at that battery and broke it and it was no longer functional but thank you juice I was able to get a replacement battery so that's awesome I want to thank Juiced bikes for having a place to put a GPS tracker they actually are going to pass this on to you this is a really feel good story because of the happy outcome if you order an e-bike from juice between now at the end of the year they will give you a free Apple Air tag just put in the code Liz air tag and you'll get a free air tag with your bike I'm really grateful that the Saint George police had it together and they're the ones that helped me find my bike so thank you so much for your help on that and I'm super happy to have my bike back and we'll be locking it up with that hardened steel chain lock every time let me know in the comments if you have ever had anything stolen and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Liz Amazing

Views: 668,871

Keywords: RV life, Fulltime RV living, stolen ebike, ripcurrent, juiced bikes, hollywood racks, gps tracker, air tag, thieves, thief

Id: 0OLzntLQS3U

Length: 9min 39sec (579 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022