Palm Springs bike shop vandalism, burglary caught on camera
A burglary was caught on camera in Downtown Palm Springs where a window was shattered by a BB gun and a person was seen taking an electric bike.
Bikes are being wheeled out for display as this shop opens up in Downtown Palm Springs, a boarded up window though sits behind with shards of glass visible.
“It’s kind of scary that somebody is shooting at your windows,” Antonio Torres, co-owner of Bike Palm Springs Rentals, said.
He says a driver Monday night, caught on surveillance footage shattered the window shooting it with a BB gun raising safety concerns.
“Maybe people walking by, somebody could have been shot. Luckily it was a pellet gun. Not a bullet,” Torres said.
Minutes later, this man is seen riding on a bike…dumping it off…and stealing an electric bike from the shop and taking off. Torres says this is the first time a burglary has happened in the shop and was stunned it happened in the downtown area.
“You kind of have this sense of feeling a little bit safer being on Indian Canyon, but I guess that’s not the case,” he said. {“url”:”https://twitter.com/JeremyChenKESQ/status/1057765100717834240″,”author_name”:”Jeremy Chen”,”author_url”:”https://twitter.com/JeremyChenKESQ”,”html”:”&#lt;blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”&#gt;&#lt;p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”&#gt;Do you recognize this man? He was caught on surveillance video stealing an electric bike from BIKE Palm Springs Rentals in downtown Monday night. Full story on what led up to this robbery and the vandalism that occurred beforehand coming up tonight on &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/KESQ?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;@KESQ&#lt;/a&#gt; and &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/LocalTwo?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;@LocalTwo&#lt;/a&#gt;. &#lt;a href=”https://t.co/jdhwV1JQwO”&#gt;pic.twitter.com/jdhwV1JQwO&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/p&#gt;— Jeremy Chen (@JeremyChenKESQ) &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/JeremyChenKESQ/status/1057765100717834240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;October 31, 2018&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/blockquote&#gt;n&#lt;script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″&#gt;&#lt;/script&#gt;n”,”width”:550,”height”:null,”type”:”rich”,”cache_age”:”3153600000″,”provider_name”:”Twitter”,”provider_url”:”https://twitter.com”,”version”:”1.0″} Torres said the stolen electric bike costs around $1,400 and the theft comes at an inconvenient time as Pride Week is this weekend when they see an uptick in business.
“There’s definitely a lot of foot traffic and we get some attention from that,” he said.
Palm Springs Police says they are investigating, and said the same BB gun shooter targeted multiple businesses in the city.
“We’ve determined that there have been 11 incidents overall that we have identified at this point and of those 11 incidents, the majority of them were downtown,” Sgt. Mike Casavan said.
However officers say they don’t believe the BB gun shooter and the bike theft are related, just an unfortunate coincidence. Torres has this to say to the bike thief.
“Have a little respect for other people’s property. It is a business and at the end of the day, it’s people’s livelihood,” he said.
Anyone with information about any of these incidents is encouraged to contact the Palm Springs Police Department at (760) 323-8116.
