Cape Coral police say a man took an e-bike from outside a Del Prado Boulevard business, came back while officers were still there to claim the hundred dollar reward for finding it, and was arrested at his home

Cape Coral police say a man stole an electric bicycle from outside a business on Del Prado Boulevard South on Saturday morning and then collected a hundred dollar reward for producing it, Gulf Coast News reports.

According to the department, officers responded to a reported theft at a business in the 4500 block of Del Prado Boulevard South at about 7.55 a.m. The owner told officers he had gone inside for less than ten minutes and returned to find the bicycle gone. He valued it at about fifteen hundred dollars, with roughly eight hundred dollars of equipment in saddlebags attached to it.

While officers were on scene, an employee of the business told them he had gone looking for the bicycle and had spoken with a man and a woman about a block south, near 46th Street, police said. The man asked whether there was a reward for finding the bicycle, and the employee told him there would be a hundred dollars.

Police say the man then approached the officers and the owner at the business and said he had found the bicycle, giving a location in the 4500 block of Southeast 15th Avenue. The owner recovered it there and paid him the hundred dollars, and the man left the area.

Officers later spoke to the woman who had been with him. Police say she positively identified him as the man in surveillance footage taken from near the business.

That footage, according to the department, showed the owner arriving at the business on the bicycle at about 7.46 a.m., a man matching the same description walking towards where it was parked at about 7.49 a.m., and the same man riding it away at about 7.50 a.m., in the direction he had come from.

Officers located the man at his home and arrested him.

All of that is the police account. A man has been arrested. He has not been tried, no plea is on the public record, and he is presumed innocent. Nothing here is a finding that he did what the department says he did.

This desk is not naming him. One outlet is carrying this story, no second local newsroom has it, and neither a police release nor an arrest record was available for this desk to read, so the account reaches the public at second hand through a single station. That is a thinner footing than this desk would want before putting a private person's name to an accusation on a matter of this size.

Conditions were checked in the same pass. The National Weather Service has two active alerts in Florida and neither covers Lee or Collier County. There are no active cyclones in the Atlantic, and power is normal in both counties.