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Sometime on Sept. 9, Alex Shyduroff rolled up to Bennett Hall and hopped off his bike, stashing it behind a bush.
Leaving the building nearly an hour later, he made a discovery all too familiar to students at the University of Maine — his bike was nowhere to be found.
Someone came by and rode off into the sunset with a free set of wheels.
Frequent readers of Police Beat will notice a distinct similarity between Shyduroff’s case and many others that happen weekly around the Orono campus — it was left unlocked while he went inside.
“I generally don’t leave my bike unlocked. I know that’s kind of asking for it,” Shyduroff, a sixth-year physics student, said. “I didn’t really care because it’s a cheap bike, but it’s a major inconvenience.”
According to University of Maine Police Department Detective Keith Mercier, 22 bikes have been reported to UMPD as stolen since Jan. 1, 2011.
Going into October, that figure may seem low compared to the final totals from past years — 69 in 2009 and 68 in 2010 — but several factors, like poor riding weather in the winter or students not bothering to file a report, skew the numbers.
“We hardly have any in the summer,” Mercier said, explaining a possible reason for the disparity. “It’s such a hard animal to wrap your head around, this bike theft thing.”
“The majority are just people leaving them unlocked,” he added. “A lot of them are kids going on joy rides across campus and the owner has no idea where their bike went.”
Mercier said students without a proper lock could always stop by the Public Safety building to grab one of the free cable gun locks provided by UMPD.
“We’ve got a pile of them,” he said.
Second-year animal and veterinary sciences student Jessica Nyholm also recently lost a bike to a bandit.
Arriving at Penobscot Hall around midnight Sept. 3, she secured her bike to the rack with a combination lock. Upon leaving the dorm building the next morning, she found someone had taken both her bike and the lock.
“I don’t know if they clipped the lock or figured [the combination] out or what,” Nyholm said.
While she admits she only changed one of the four tumblers on the combination after wrapping the cable around her bike and the rack, Nyholm is baffled someone would go through the trouble of breaking through her lock to steal her bike.
“My bike isn’t even nice. I mean, it’s rusty,” Nyholm said of her missing Huffy.
Nyholm’s experience of losing a properly secured bike is part of a growing trend of campus cycle thefts. Within the past week, Mercier said two locks had been cut — one by a thief and another by UMPD, who were forced to remove a bike from a dorm stairwell that was in violation of campus fire codes.
Even with a total of four clipped locks this semester, Mercier does not believe this to be part of a coordinated effort seeking to profit from pilfered property.
“I don’t think we have this secret bicycle theft ring on campus,” he said, adding that minimal earnings from such a venture would lead most would-be thieves to seek more valuable targets.
The case of Raul Urbina’s missing bike might at least partially debunk Mercier’s theory, however. A resident of the University Park housing complex located just off of College Avenue, Urbina left his apartment one morning to find just a cut cable lock where he left his $500 Fuji Nevada 1.0 mountain bike secured to a post the night before.
According to Urbina, several residents of the complex often leave bikes unlocked on a regular basis, including a friend of his whose bicycle was still sitting on a grassy lawn the morning Urbina found his snipped cable.
Urbina speculated that several features commonly only found on more expensive bikes — disc brakes, adjustable front suspension, a lightweight aluminum frame — draw a thief’s interest mores so than the other unlocked rides scattered throughout the area.
Further conjecture by Urbina placed the source of the thiefs at a local bus stop.
“There is a small construction there for kids to wait for the bus,” he said, adding that on several occasions he has seen people milling around that area past 10 p.m.
Nyholm stands a better chance of being reunited with her wheels than Shyduroff for one simple reason: her ride carries a UMPD identification tag that helps officers locate the rightful owner of a found bike.
“It’s a no-brainer if it’s registered with the department,” Mercier said. “A lot of the time, we can find the owner before they even know it’s missing.”
Previously, students have had to make the trek out to the Public Safety building on Rangeley Road to register their bicycles, filling out a form with basic contact information and a description of the bike before being issued a sticker carrying a unique number.
Soon, however, the age of technology will once again allow people to remain in the comfort of their homes as UMPD is currently setting up an online registration service similar to the existing program for keys.
For those reluctant to surrender their personal information to The Man, being reunited with a stolen bike can be a much more time-consuming activity for both officers and victims that carries no guarantee even if the bike is found by UMPD.
Without any identification, officers do not know whom to contact when a bicycle is found and officers do not regularly check the descriptions on official reports against the bikes impounded behind the Public Safety building. A false identification could be made with vague description, which could lead to the wrong person receiving the wrong bike.
“The entire process is so frustrating,” Mercier said, adding that a bike is “not a car or a motorcycle where you have a [Vehicle Identification Number] or registration plate where you can look up who the owner is.”
For students who have lost their unregistered bikes and wish to get them back from UMPD if recovered, Mercier said the best policy is to periodically check with the police or look through the impound.
Otherwise, it could sit chained to the rack for six months, after which point it would either be given to the blue bikes program run by the MaineBound Adventure Center or donated to a local charitable auction.
“John Doe can report his bike stolen on Monday, we can find it Tuesday, and he could not get it back if he doesn’t follow up and come look at the bikes,” Mercier said.
Sometimes just keeping a sharp eye out can turn up a missing bike. Shyduroff previously lost a bike at the beginning of winter to a thief outside of Knox Hall, only to be reunited with it the following spring.
“One of my friends found it in the woods, actually,” he said.
A repeat victim, Shyduroff believes the issue of bike theft points to a larger issue of a lack of respect for fellow students on campus.
“I don’t even park my car on campus anymore because I don’t want stuff stolen out of it,” he said. “I think it’s representative of the way people treat each other on campus.”
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