Six charged in string of Bend Senior HS bike thefts

The Bend Police Department’s “bait bike” program recently helped lead to the arrest of five Bend residents and a transient accused in a string of bike thefts from a Bend Senior High School program that teaches students to fix and build bicycles, officers said Thursday.

Police were made aware early last month of several bike thefts from a locked storage area at the school, Lt. Clint Burleigh said. While unsure how the culprits gained access, it’s “likely they climbed a fence” to get into the area, Burleigh said.

After several bikes disappeared, the teachers running the program notified the school resource officer, Burleigh said.

Working with patrol officers and the department’s Intelligent-Led Policing Team, police began a “proactive policing effort,” including the use of “bait bikes” that help police find them and has led to numerous arrests in recent years.

Between April 15-24, six people were arrested for possessing bikes stolen from the school. Two of the “bait bikes” and two others stolen recently were recovered, Burleigh said.

Five Bend residents were arrested on charges of first-degree theft and second-degree criminal trespass: Anastacia Egan, 23, Eric Fletcher, 23, Eric Spott, 54, Mark Miltimore, 29, and Nicholas Lopez, 35. Transient Mitchell Travis Charriere, 27, also faces those two charges, as well as two counts of second-degree theft and methamphetamine possession.

All six were taken at various times to the Deschutes County Jail and later released.

Burleigh said it’s evident that the bike thefts, while not necessarily coordinated with each other, are tied to the area’s drug trade.

“We have not been able to recover all the bikes that we believed were stolen from there,” Burleigh said. “There’s a consistent pattern of people taking bikes from there.”

A meeting is planned with the school resource officer to work on better securing the bikes used in the program, many of which are donated by police.

“The property we get and are not able to identify the owners, we either sell online, or we can give them to a local program,” Burleigh said.

Burleigh said police are committed to reducing bike thefts in the community. They highly encourage residents to record serial numbers at www.bikeindex.org, as well as to take photos of your bikes, lock them up using a high-quality bike lock and report if your bike has been stolen.

“Our officers are finding abandoned bicycles every day,” he wrote in a news release, “and our goal is to return stolen property to the rightful owners.”