FRESNO, Calif. (FOX26) — UPDATE: The electric trike that was stolen in front of a home has been returned to the owner.
The Fresno Police Department says a FOX26 viewer saw the story online and noticed the trike.
They called the police who came out and were able to return the electric trike to its rightful owner.
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A Fresno man now says he’s without his only mode of transportation after someone stole his electric trike from right in front of his home Saturday afternoon.
“I can’t walk very much. I’m disabled,” said 66-year-old Benson Martin, outside his home in the Fresno Mobile Estates, near Blackstone and Gettysburg, Monday afternoon.
Martin says he had been at a friend’s house when he rode his trike home.
He planned to be there for just a few minutes.
But, as surveillance video shows, that’s all it took for a crook to steal it—just feet from Martin’s home.
The video shows a man casing out the Addmotor eTrike, which Martin says is valued at $3,200.
“I don’t even know who he is,” he says.
The man walked away, only to return minutes later, walking away with it.
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“When I came out the bike was gone,” Martin says. “You can pedal and take off in it. If you don’t know what you’re doing you can hurt yourself pretty bad, too. You can flip it.”
Martin says he usually locks up the trike when he makes trips to the store or to run errands.
He had even been building an enclosure to keep it at night, complete with a tarp to cover everything.
“I was at my own home few a few minutes. I didn’t think nothing of it,” he says.
While Martin says he filed a police report, he says he’s pleading with the person who took it—or who has it—to return it, all charges dropped, for a $50 reward.
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But he warned, “If I don’t get the bike back, we’ll be in court.”