Everett mom who confronted alleged thief gets son’s bike back

Criminals, take note — don’t mess with Everett mom Cate Harrington.

Harrington first came on the Dori Monson Show show two years ago when she organized crews to pick up syringes and drug paraphernalia. She made headlines again earlier this week when she spotted and confronted the man who allegedly stole her 11-year-old son’s bike out of their fenced yard.

“I was driving down Broadway in North Everett when my son’s bike literally cut me off,” she said with a laugh.

The determined Everett mom followed the suspected bicycle thief to the parking lot of a pizza restaurant, where she asked for the bike back. She said that he refused to give her the bicycle and yelled that he would shoot her, though she believes this threat was unsubstantiated, as he held no weapon.

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At this point, Harrington began recording a video and went after the man herself. The suspect got away, but she later put the video on social media.

She said that she felt she had to take matters into her own hands if she wanted her son to have his bike again.

“If I had called 911, it’s not going to be a high-priority call — it’s a children’s bike that got stolen,” Harrington said. “So chances are that he was going to be long gone by the time they responded.”

While Harrington was doing an interview with Q13 News Tuesday evening in Everett, the man rode up and told the Q13 reporter that he thought the bike had been stolen from his brother. He added that he felt bad for Harrington, as he had also had a bike stolen while he was in jail.

“My question to him was, ‘Then why didn’t you stop when I first stopped you?’ … We could have resolved it right then and there,” Harrington said. “Instead he chose to right away call me names and threaten me.”

These, she told him, are “not the actions of an innocent person.”

Ultimately, Harrington got the bike back, but she said it’s not the same bike as can be seen in the video from earlier this week.

“They stripped it, they took a lot of things off of it, they spray-painted it,” she said.

She added that the suspect had admitted to her that he changed the bike.

“Why would you change it if you were not trying to hide the fact that it was stolen?” she said.

She would like to see the man prosecuted, but noted that usually, when thieves give a stolen bike back to the owner on law enforcement’s orders, they don’t get charged with a crime.

“He’s probably already got a new [stolen bike],” she commented.

Four years ago, Harrington founded the Facebook Group Take Back Our Neighborhood to try to put a stop to the crime in town. The group has garnered over 3,300 members, but Harrington said that despite the activism, not much has changed on Everett’s streets.

“We’re tired of being victims and feeling like we’re forced to continue to be a victim,” she said. “Because we do all the right things, and we still don’t get the right results … we still haven’t seen the kind of results that we would’ve expected to have seen by now with the programs that are being set in place.”

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