Edhat Staff
UC Santa Barbara Police (UCPD) and the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office arrested a suspected prolific bicycle thief on Tuesday afternoon.
Jason Kirby, 42 of Goleta, was arrested for being in possession of stolen property, drugs, and burglary tools. Kirby had previously been arrested for stolen property, according to the UCPD.
The investigation began when an undergraduate student’s bicycle was stolen from campus. The student had placed a tracking device on their bicycle and provided this information to law enforcement.
Police tracked the bicycle and recovered it among a cache of bicycles at a storage facility on Upper State Street. Kirby was arrested at this storage facility, UCPD states.
Among the recovered bikes was another that had recently been reported stolen from the UC Santa Barbara campus.
UCPD believes some of the bicycles discovered in the storage facility may have also been stolen from campus. Any community member is encouraged to report recent bike thefts.
“The arrest of Jason Kirby was the result of modern technology coupled with good police work,” said Lt. Matt Bowman of the UCPD. “Thanks to a student putting an AirTag on their bike, UCPD was able to track its location and make this arrest. That bike, along with seventeen others, was recovered. Our hope is to be able to reunite those victims with their property.”
“It’s also a great reminder for students to register their bikes and make a report if they are stolen,” Bowman continued. “Both greatly increase the chances we can recover them in the event they are stolen.”
Interesting. I was going for a run at Goleta Beach a few weeks ago and I saw a middle-aged dude on a bike – “guiding” another bike along side him…made me wonder if he was stealing it.
See something, say something:) I’ll guess in most cases there’s not much for the cops to follow up or do other than look for the bike. In this case the tracking device made a difference in how the report was handled.
Yeah, I’m a 5’2″ female, not sure I’m going to be chasing down a bigger dude on a bike.
I always assume theft when seeing someone walking more than 1 bike by themselves.
I’m more shocked the cops followed up on this since bike thefts are usually small potatoes to other things going on. Kudos to the undergrad who did the work for them in finding this jerk.