Bike group pleads for the STL public to help find memorial bike created for fellow ride

By Gabriela Vidal

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    ST. LOUIS, Missouri (KMOV) — It is out of a love for cycling and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that the small group bike riding community, called Bici, formed.

“Just a way for people to spend time with each other when we weren’t allowed to be together indoors,” said Andrea Hitsman. “Everybody is pretty good friends and it’s a way to kind of have an adventure in the middle of the city.”

Hitsman is one of the co-founders of the Bici.

“I started it with my late boyfriend, my late partner, Jeff Riggs,” said Hitsman.

It was shocking and devastating to the group when Riggs died unexpectedly on May 26, 2021.

“He’s a really charismatic guy. He was a bartender. He was an artist [and] creative,” said Hitsman. “The people that loved him we all really loved him.”

In the days following Riggs’s death cyclists came together to create a memorial bike in honor of him.

“We took one of his old bicycles that he didn’t ride anymore and we kind of deconstructed it so it couldn’t ever be ridden, and a lot of our friends in the group are artists and everyone decorated it. They could sign their names,” said Hitsman.

The symbol of his memory remained chained up against a bike rack next to Stella Blues in the Tower Grove South neighborhood for nearly two years.

“Two days short of two years, and then it disappeared sometime maybe a day or two before the two-year anniversary,” said Hitsman. “We all just came up [on Friday] and it was gone, so yeah it was super sad.”

Since last Friday, cyclists have been looking for the memorial bike throughout the city.

“It’s kind of like losing a piece of his memory. I help paint the bike with my friends and that was a really cathartic mourning process,” said Sean Chladek, one of the cyclists with Bici.

“We asked the restaurant, we’ve asked some people in the neighborhood, has anybody seen it,” said Hitsman.

Now, they are pleading with the public and whoever may have taken the bike to return it, even offering 250 dollars for the piece of memory back.

“If they took it because they needed some funds, we would rather help them. If somebody took it because they need a bike, again it’s unrideable, and as a group we can probably help somebody scrounge up a bike if they needed one to get to work,” said Hitsman.

“It means a lot to a lot of people in St. Louis to have that bike back,” said Chladek.

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