The Bicycle Thief -- No, Not the De Sica Movie

Steven Ongley returned a favor when he raced outside his office and sent a would-be bike thief running mid-caper.

The foiled—and video-recorded—incident took place last Thursday.

Jake Siegel, a 25-year-old policy fellow for the research and advocacy group Connecticut Voices for Children, was inside the organization’s Whitney Avenue offices. He had ridden his Next mountain bike to work and locked it on Audubon Street near the corner of Whitney.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Siegel, a man wandered up to bike and took cutters to the lock’s KryptoFlex 818 Cable. He made quick work of it.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the thief, Aimee Kanzler, a manager in a Yale IT office, noticed him as she looked out the fourth-floor window of her 55 Whitney Ave. office.

“That guy down there seems to be stealing a bike,” she said to her coworkers.

Steven Ongley and Bryan Kazdan took a look. It did seem to look that way.

Kanzler called police. Kazdan pulled out his cellphone camera. And Ongley bolted down the stairs.

He caught up with the man by the bike. The cable was now cut. The cutters were in his pocket.

“Hey,” Ongley asked him. “Everything OK?”

“Everything’s good,” the man replied. “Everything’s fine.”

“From up there,” Ongley continued, “it looked like somebody was trying to cut a lock.”

At that point the man ran down Audubon, down Whitney toward Church.

Little did the man know the area was swarming with cops investigating a bank robbery. (Read about that here.)

The cops were too busy, though, to respond to the bike call. Kanzler, Ongley and Kazdan waited 45 minutes without hearing back from the New Haven police. They then called the Yale police, who took a report.

Meanwhile, Ongley went inside the Koffee? coffeeshop by the bike rack where the caper took place. He thought the rider might be inside. No luck. But a barista took the bike inside and left a note outside on the rack informing the Next mountain bike’s owner that his wheels were inside. Siegel found the note later in the day and reclaimed the bike.

“I’m eternally grateful to all the folks at Yale IT, especially Steve [Ongley] for running down the stairs and confronting the guy,” Siegel said.