When This Nurse’s E-Bike Was Stolen, the Community Rallied Around Her

From Bicycling

• Kathy Hughes, an ICU nurse at Wellington Regional Hospital in New Zealand, discovered that her e-bike had been stolen from outside the hospital after her shift on March 25.

• Hughes posted the news to Twitter and a local Facebook page for stolen bikes. The responses were overwhelmingly positive.

• Local bike shops and Fuji Bikes offered to replace it. Before they could, a good samaritan found her stolen bike and retrieved it.

With the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe right now, times are tougher than usual. For Kathy Hughes, a Lifeflight and intensive care unit nurse at Wellington Regional Hospital in Wellington, New Zealand, things got even worse late last month when she discovered her bike—which she uses to commute—had been stolen.

Nurses like Hughes, and other frontline workers, are working relentlessly right now to combat the pandemic. So, when Hughes finished her shift at the hospital on March 25, the last thing she wanted to see was that her e-bike was missing.

“I don’t think I even felt anything, I was totally just empty is the only word,” Hughes told The New Zealand Herald. “We’re all so tired and running on scraps at the hospital, because we’re working so hard to prepare everything, that I just didn’t have anything left to even feel anything about it."

It was a harsh blow. Hughes’s e-bike, a Fuji Conductor 2.1+, was only a few months old. (Not to mention, e-bikes cost more than traditional bicycles.) She took to Twitter to share the terrible news, and she listed her e-bike on a local Facebook page for missing bikes.

The next 24 hours would prove incredibly heartening. After tweeting about her misfortune, Hughes’s post gained traction and she received an influx of “overwhelming love and kindness.” People reached out to show their support, a complete stranger set up a GoFundMe on her behalf, and local bike shops offered to lend or give her a replacement bike—including the shop from which she purchased her e-bike, Evo Cycles.

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Fuji Bikes, the manufacturer of Hughes’s e-bike, heard about the stolen bike through Twitter, and wanted to hook her up with a new one. Milay Galvez, senior sales and marketing manager for BikeCo (Fuji’s parent company), told Bicycling they reached out to its Oceania Cycle Sport regional sales office, who then reached out to its distributor Evo Cycles. Coordinating their efforts across time zones, the company was able to secure a bike to donate in less than 24 hours from the manufacturer in Taiwan.

In the meantime, the universe was working its magic elsewhere.

That same day, Hughes was miraculously reunited with her stolen e-bike thanks to Benjamin Friedlander, who saw Hughes’s post on the local Facebook page. Just a day later, Friedlander happened upon an unlocked e-bike outside of a grocery store. Thinking it was likely her stolen e-bike, Friedlander locked it with his own bike lock.

There were some other tell-tale signs that it was Hughes’s bike, too: the front thru axle was (rather dangerously) missing, and the thief hadn’t been able to charge the battery because he didn’t have the key to do so.

“Bold to keep riding it??” Hughes humorously wrote in a tweet. “Can only assume he wants to meet me in my ICU?”

Now that she’s been reunited with her bike, Hughes plans to give the money raised through GoFundMe and the donated bike to a good cause.

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