Apple AirTags helped police track down stash of bikes stolen from throughout Colorado Rocky Mountains and Eagle County
The Vail Police Department says it tracked down and recovered bikes stolen from Vail, Boulder, Aspen and Buena Vista and was able to tie a suspect to those thefts as well as bike thefts at Copper Mountain
Apple AirTags helped the Vail Police Department track down a stash of stolen bicycles and charge a suspect with the theft of the high-end equipment, according to documents filed in Eagle County court.
During the two-year investigation, the Vail Police Department gathered evidence that it says links the suspect to stealing nearly a dozen mountain bikes in Eagle and Summit counties between August and September 2022.
The 5th Judicial District has charged a 34-year-old man, who is already serving a six-year sentence in the Limon Correctional Facility on a conviction out of Boulder County, with theft of between $20,000 and $100,000, a Class 4 felony, court documents state.
Vail Police located the stash of stolen bicycles after a resident reported in late September 2022 that two of his Specialized Stumpjumper mountain bikes had been stolen from the bike rack where he locked them at his condo complex.
The Vail resident reported that his bikes had a combined value of $13,000 and had AirTags hidden in them, allowing him to track their location via his phone’s Find My iPhone app, according to court documents.

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That morning, the AirTags were stationary in the Federal Heights area of Denver but soon began traveling south on Interstate 25, Vail Police wrote in court documents. A detective and officer reportedly followed the location of the AirTags until they stopped at a truck stop in Walsenburg.
There, police located a van that appeared to have bikes covered with a tarp on the rooftop cargo rack and requested assistance from the Huerfano County Sheriff’s Office, which stopped the van, according to court documents.
The driver of the van consented to a search of the vehicle, and police located one of the Vail resident’s bikes with an AirTag in it, court documents state. The van owner reportedly denied knowing that there was stolen property in his van.
Police seized and impounded the van before executing a search warrant on it, discovering an additional 17 bicycles, at least eight of which were determined to have been stolen from Vail, the Boulder area, Aspen and Buena Vista, according to court documents.
Vail Police also received a search warrant for the phone records of the man driving the van with the stolen bikes and were able to narrow in on a suspect who had a previous record of bike theft out of Boulder County, court documents state.
Police used tattoos and other defining features to identify the suspect in security footage from multiple bike thefts as well as cell phone records to confirm he was in the area where the bike thefts occurred, according to court documents. In some cases, police obtained search warrants for messages that reportedly showed that the suspect had attempted to sell some of the stolen bikes.
Ultimately, the Vail Police Department wrote in court documents that it gathered evidence to link the suspect to the theft of more than a dozen bikes and one motorcycle from the Vail and Copper Mountain area. Police managed to recover the motorcycle and a number of the stolen bicycles.
Vail Police are also pursuing arrest warrants under Colorado’s Organized Crime Control Act for others thought to be involved in the bike thefts, including the driver of the van, according to court documents.
This story is from SummitDaily.com