AUSTIN, Texas – A local business has hired a private investigator after several burglaries. Lance Armstrong’s bike shop in downtown Austin has been hit seven times in 10 months and a couple of suspected burglars are still on the loose.

“There’s a very active stolen bike community in Austin,” StriderPI private investigator Dave Amis said.

Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop reported seven burglaries since September, five at the retail store and two at the store’s storage unit. Trick Hat Workway, the space next door, reported at least one burglary.

“What people don’t realize is that there’s far more criminal activity out there than almost anybody realizes,” Amis said.

Video shows the window of Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop being shattered and a man coming through the broken glass and walking around the store. He’s identified as 41-year-old Brian Darelle Theodore Richardson. Amis said he stole Lance Armstrong’s electric bicycle valued at $20,000. They were ultimately able to recover it. Richardson is charged with burglary of a building.

Other videos showed a man walking inside Trick Hat Workway, looking around, and talking to the manager on the way out while trying to steal the manager’s bike as if it’s his. He is kicked out, then comes back about 10 minutes later, convinces the worker the bike is his, and steals it.

“Having a Texas PI on your trail is not a pleasant experience,” Amis said.

StriderPI located and recovered the bike in two weeks, then worked with APD and identified the man who stole the bike as 23-year-old Juan Pablo Castellanos, who’s currently sitting in the Travis County Jail for other charges.

Private investigators are being hired more by businesses.

APD said it’s difficult to get to every report and investigate. The department’s commercial burglary unit has seven detectives, and they receive on average 30 to 40 burglary reports a week. APD said private investigators provide useful information at times.

“When you don’t have enough cops, you have the problem that people get away with things and so then they do it again and each time they do it, they get better and better and better,” Amis said.

To help investigators, Amis said all businesses should have cameras.

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“Cameras are just killers when it comes to who did the crime,” Amis said. “If you can get a face image of one of the burglars, we’re already halfway there and if you get a license plate number when they leave, oh, jeez, we’re like 99% of the way.”

Amis said they’ve identified four suspects. They’re still working to identify a couple of suspects who broke into the storage unit.

StriderPI offers training for people who want to become Texas private investigators. It’s the only in-person school in Texas. 

StriderPI teaches OSINT 101, which is investigation by computer, and SURVEILLANCE 102 as the first two classes. The next courses are CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS 103, UNDERCOVER OPS 104, and INVESTIGATIVE LEADERSHIP 105.

Amis said anyone from 18 to 80-years old can become a private investigator. The most recent StriderPI class helped get leads and recover a bike during Mellow Johnny’s burglary investigations. To apply, click here.

As of 2022, statistics from the FBI showed the rate of burglary in Austin was nearly twice the national average.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The majority of Houston outages that followed Hurricane Beryl should be fixed within the next two days, the city’s main utility company said Monday as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to punish CenterPoint Energy even after the lights come back.

The Texas Public Utility Commission, the state’s regulatory agency, announced Monday it had launched an investigation Abbott demanded into CenterPoint’s storm preparation and response as hundreds of thousands of residents sweltered without power for more than a week after the storm. The governor has given the utility until the end of July to submit plans to protect the power supply through the rest of what could be an active hurricane season, as well as trim trees and vegetation that threaten power lines.

But some energy experts question whether Abbott and the Texas regulators, whose leaders are appointed by the governor, have done enough before now to get tough on utilities or make transmission lines more resilient in the nation’s biggest energy producing state.

“What CenterPoint is showing us by its repeated failure to provide power, is they seem to be just incapable of doing their job,” Abbott said Monday in Houston.

Spokespeople for CenterPoint, which has defended its response and pace of restoring outages, did not immediately return an email seeking comment Monday.

A week after Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane — toppling power lines, uprooting trees and causing branches to crash into power lines — the damage from the storm and the prolonged outages have again put the resiliency of Texas’ power grid under scrutiny.

In 2021, a winter storm plunged the state into a deep freeze, knocking out power to millions of residents and pushing Texas’ grid to the brink of total collapse. Following the deadly blackout, Abbott and state lawmakers vowed changes that would better ensure that Texans would not be left in the dark in dangerous cold and heat.

Unlike that crisis — which was caused by failing power generation — Beryl created high winds that brought down power lines and knocked out power to about 2.7 million homes and businesses. Most were concentrated in the Houston area, where CenterPoint reported Monday that it had restored power to more than 2 million customers. Still, more than 200,000 remained without power.

Houston-area residents have sweltered in heat and humidity, stood in long lines for gas, food and water, and trekked to community centers to find air conditioning. Hospitals have seen a spike in patients with heat-related illnesses and carbon monoxide poisoning caused by improper use of home generators.

“This isn’t a failure of the entire system,” Abbott said. “This is an indictment of one company that’s failed to do its job.”

In a special meeting of the Houston City Council on Monday, resident Alin Boswell said he was on day eight without power and had not seen anyone from CenterPoint in his neighborhood until that morning. He said the city and the company should have known the potential for damage after storms in May knocked out power to more than 1 million.

“You all and CenterPoint had a preview of this debacle in May,” Boswell told council members.

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the failures extend beyond CenterPoint. He said regulators have been reluctant to ensure that transmission lines are more resilient and trees are sufficiently trimmed.

Hirs said Abbott and other leaders who are solely zeroing in on the utility after Beryl are looking for a scapegoat.

“Of course, not one of them have a mirror around,” he said. “It’s not CenterPoint exclusively. The regulatory compact has totally broken down.”

CenterPoint has at least 10 years of vegetation management reports on file with Texas regulators. In April, the company filed a 900-page report on long-term plans and expenses that would be needed to make its power system more resilient, from tree trimming to withstanding storms and flooding to cybersecurity attacks.

In a report filed May 1, CenterPoint said it had spent nearly $35 million on tree removal and trimming in 2023. It said it would target efforts this year across more than 3,500 miles of its estimated 29,000 miles of overhead power lines in 2024.

Vegetation management remains a key issue for avoiding another power outage when the next storm hits, said Michael Webber, a University of Texas mechanical engineering professor with a focus on clean energy technology. But it’s just one ongoing problem for power providers.

Policy makers must rebuild Texas’ energy grid to adapt to its changing climate, Webber said.

“We’ve designed our system for weather of the past,” he said.

The utility has defended its preparation for the storm and said that it has brought in about 12,000 additional workers from outside Houston. It has said it would have been unsafe to preposition those workers inside the predicted storm impact area before Beryl made landfall.

In a message to CenterPoint customers Sunday night, CEO Jason Wells wrote that the company had made “remarkable” progress.

“The strong pace of the restoration is a testament to our preparation (and) investments we have made in the system,” Wells wrote.