A man charged with the theft of privateer Michael Akaydin’s bike at the 2016 Anaheim 2 Supercross was sentenced yesterday to 36 months probation and 90 days in jail and was ordered to pay a fine of $2,890.68. Stephen Robert Allen is scheduled to serve his time at the Ventura County Jail in Ventura, California.
The incident occurred last year when Akaydin, a privateer from Kentucky, left his bike in the Angel Stadium tunnel to watch the main event and returned to find the bike missing. He immediately went to social media, asking people to keep an eye out. A friend spotted the bike in the back of a truck traveling on the highway and got photos of the truck’s license plate.
From there, the story gets a bit crazy. Here’s the version Akaydin told us following the incident last year:
We found the license plate within about an hour. What’s crazy is the police did not want to do anything. They said we couldn’t do anything until Monday morning when our detectives come in. I was just blown away. I was like, We can find out who it is. We have a license plate. That’s all we really need. When they said they couldn’t do anything, then I was like, all right, fine, then I’ll do it. I’m not going to sleep. Basically, I had to go back to my house, which is an hour in the wrong direction. I got my laptop out and started researching some stuff. There’s a sticker on the back of the truck that said Taylor Tech. It was like a little shop. He was getting bashed online because he was kind of associated with the theft.
The owner of Taylor Tech reached out to me, and he’s like, “I want to help you out. I’m pretty sure I know who this is. I can find you some addresses.” At the same time as that, there’s a kid out here, Carter Halpain—he’s a pretty fast rider. His dad is an investigator for an electronic company. He was a detective and wanted to reach out and help me too. He was like, “I can probably find some addresses for you.” Between those two guys, I got three addresses. I was like, All right, I’m not going to go to sleep. I’m going to find this thing.
I grabbed my buddy Jake Rice and woke him up. I was like, “Dude, let’s go find this thing.” We took off about two or three in the morning. It took us about two and a half hours to get up to that area. At that point, we had the addresses. We just kept going around to these three addresses. One was a business, so it didn’t really turn up much Sunday morning real early. We went to all these addresses twice. We got a tip from a neighbor at one point saying he’s going through a divorce and he’s staying up in this other neighborhood. We drove to this neighborhood, trying to see if we see any truck or anything. At this point we’re like six hours in, still no sleep. It’s like 9:00 or 10:00. The investigator that was helping us out, the detective, he suggested this one address, but we couldn’t see the house from the road. It had a gated driveway, so we couldn’t even really see if it was there. The detective suggested going on a hike up this mountain, kind of around the backside of his house, and seeing what we could see. I was like, “All right, we’ll give that a shot.” I can’t make this stuff up.
By chance, the guy that I drove out to California with from Kentucky brought a pair of binoculars. I was kind of giving him some crap for it. We grabbed those, and we literally hiked up a grassy mountain and kind of walked across this field where we can see the house with binoculars. By sheer dumb luck, within five minutes, this white truck starts rolling in off this back dirt road, kind of like a back entrance to his house. We saw something in the back. It looked like red trash to me, but we got the binoculars out and my friend was like, “Dude, that’s your bike!” I was like, “No way! Give me the binoculars!” I checked it out, and sure enough, that was my bike. It was such a surreal feeling, seeing the bike that you thought was gone. Then the guy proceeds to pull up to the house, and he has a big old blue shipping container behind his house. He unloads the bike, puts it in the shipping container, closes it up, locks it up, and drives back down this dirt road.
At this point, we knew where the bike was. I was like, “I’m not going to leave this area until we have it.” We called the local cops there and said, “Hey, I had my bike stolen last night. I know exactly where it is. Can you come please meet us?” We walked back down the hill and then kind of off the side of the road, out of sight from the house. We gave them the information to try to catch them up on what happened. Going through the whole thing, and then literally within ten minutes of being there, the guy drives by in his truck. I was like, “That’s him! Grab him!” Within a quarter mile, they had him pulled over. At that point, we were on cloud nine. We were so pumped. My hope was just to get the bike back. Not only did we get that back, but we got the guy caught too.
You can read our full interview with Akaydin here.
