Cycle of Justice
It's not uncommon for bicycles to go missing on the University of Washington campus. Fancy $5,000 road bikes, busted $50 beaters—all of them end up in the hands of thieves, and usually at a faster clip during the summer months, when more people ride instead of drive and bike lifters have plentiful prey. Snipping through cable locks and snatching untended cycles, they make off with about 125 bikes annually, according to UW police.
What is incredibly uncommon is for one of these stolen bikes to be recovered—and even more uncommon is for such a bike to be recovered by a 25-year-old bioengineering grad student who has taken the law into her own hands, stalked her stolen property on Craigslist, jawboned authorities in two states into action, and even tried to set up a Wal-Mart parking-lot sting operation, all to recover a Redline Conquest Pro (a cyclo-cross bike) that she bought used last fall for $850. "I'm not one to give up easily," explained the student, Michelle McCully.