When Drew Nelson awoke at 6 a.m. Oct. 3 to discover that his two white Stromer electric bikes were missing from his garage, he thought they were gone for good.

However, the stolen bikes were back at his La Jolla home later the same day, with the help of neighbors via what he considered an unlikely online platform.

Nelson, an agent with Willis Allen Real Estate in La Jolla, spent the morning reviewing security footage, on which he saw someone enter his inadvertently open garage and leave with one of the e-bikes at 1:56 a.m. and return soon after for the second bike.

Stromer e-bikes are priced on the company’s website from nearly $3,000 to nearly $14,000.

The footage wasn’t clear enough to identify a suspect, but Nelson still had hope.

“Those bikes would never be able to be used after the battery dies and the locking code mechanism kicks in, [and] they’d probably just get abandoned at that point,” he said. “So I thought they couldn’t have gone too far.”

He called California Bicycle, the store where he bought the bikes years ago, and was advised to go on the social media platform Nextdoor to detail what happened.

Nelson said he had used Nextdoor before but thought it would be “unproductive” since, from his experience, commenters could get off topic. Reluctantly, though, he made a post about the sequence of events.

Hours later, he found the help he needed. A community member replied to his post, saying two white e-bikes  were chained to a sign at the entrance to Kate Sessions Park on Soledad Road. Soon after, another person reported having seen the same thing at around 3:30 a.m.

Nelson and a friend retrieved and unlocked the bikes, placed them on the back of a truck and had them back at Nelson’s home by 1 p.m.

“They were soaking wet because they had been left out all night in the sprinklers, but by the time I got them home, it was like they had just gone through a bike wash,” Nelson said.

Nelson reached out to both Nextdoor tipsters to express his gratitude. Both told the La Jolla Light they didn’t want to be identified.

“This was an example of exactly how Nextdoor should work,” Nelson said. “I don’t know that it always does, but in this particular case, just the sheer goodwill of members of the community was channeled through Nextdoor.”

Catharine Douglass, chairwoman of the La Jolla Town Council’s Public Safety Committee, said community engagement is “paramount” to preventing crime and said she often uses social media to find information about crimes and residents’ concerns to submit to the San Diego Police Department.

“If people in the community don’t speak up and say anything, it goes unsolved,” she said.

Douglass said residents can email concerns to Tom Cairns, community relations officer for the Police Department’s Northern Division, at [email protected]. ♦