Police are investigating a robbery that sent a Seattle bike-shop owner to the hospital with a broken finger after she tried to defend herself Monday morning.
Patricia Ramos, co-owner of bike-rental store Pedal Anywhere, was working alone in the South Lake Union shop in the 600 block of Eastlake Avenue East around 10:30 a.m. when a man came in. He had visited a few times before about a month earlier, Ramos said, so she immediately recognized him.
“He had brought us a bike and it looked really pieced together … He wanted us to fix it. He said somebody had taken it from him and now it didn’t work,” she said in a phone interview Tuesday.
When store employees checked the bike’s serial number, they found it had been reported stolen last year, so they reached out to the original owner and returned it.
When the man came back to pick it up a few days later, employees told him they couldn’t return a stolen bike, but gave him one of their donated bikes instead. He left — a bit agitated — but Ramos said she thought that was the end of it.
On Monday, he came back, asking for the bike again, Ramos said.
“I just got in front of him,” Ramos said. “I didn’t want him to run into the store … He wasn’t making eye contact. He wasn’t looking at me. He just kept looking down.”
Then, she said, he started making threats, telling her he might come back and destroy the windows or shoot up the store.
After Ramos stood firm and asked the man to leave, he got frustrated, shoved her to the ground and grabbed the nearest bike, she said. She later found that the fall broke one of her fingers.
A surveillance video from the bike shop shows Ramos popped back up, grabbed a large wrench (the store calls it the “super wrench”) from the back of the store and started swinging.
“The first time I went to swing, I couldn’t because I didn’t want to hurt a person,” she said. “Then he threatened me again and I was like, ‘OK, now he’s physically hurting me and I’m concerned for myself and my employees.'”
The man threw her to the ground again, and Ramos got back up to hit him with the wrench, which she said weighs about 10 pounds and is usually used to change cassettes or loosen a bike’s gears.
He pushed her again in the doorway before riding away on the bike.
Ramos said while she doesn’t know if the threat was serious, she’s looking into potentially moving the store’s location.
“I was scared, but I was more scared for what could happen,” Ramos said. “I just want him out and want him to not be able to mess with us. I just want this to end.”
Seattle police are investigating the robbery, but no arrests have been made yet, a department spokesman said Tuesday afternoon.