Earlier this week, three Cobble Hill shop owners moonlighted as detectives.
On Sunday, September 9, the owners of a motorcycle shop in Cobble Hill realized one of their white Honda CR250 motorcycles had been stolen.
Before contacting the police, the owners turned to the community over social media for help. The owners posted their situation and pictures of the stolen motorcycle on Facebook, and within 24 hours had been tipped off to the location of the vehicle in a Nanaimo yard.
Like an undercover scene from out of a movie, the shop owners posed as buyers for the stolen motorcycle and ventured to the Nanaimo property.
Sure enough, the motorcycle was there, and the owners live-broadcasted the entire event on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/dustin.hofer.7/videos/10157683488154307/
“You guys are on camera. You guys are selling stolen property. The police are on their way right now,” said Dustin Hofer, as they loaded their bike into their truck while broadcasting to Facebook.
After the bike was secured and the police were enroute, the Nanaimo property owners released several pit bulls onto the yard, forcing the store owners into their car.
While the motorcycle was found on the property, officers were unable to determine who took the bike and how long it had been on the property. “Without definitive proof, no arrests were made and charges are unlikely,” said the RCMP in a press release.
The RCMP would like to remind everyone that while the motorcycle was retrieved in a timely manner, the owners put themselves at unnecessary risk.
“This is certainly a great story but the owners should have contacted the RCMP prior to driving on to the property. This would have been the most prudent and safest means to look for their stolen bike. The bike would still have been recovered and the possibility of violence would have been minimized”, said Constable Gary O’Brien of the Nanaimo RCMP.
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