Crawling burglar steals $104,000 worth of bikes

BRANDON (FOX 13) - Surveillance video shows a thief crawling on the floor of a bike shop moments before he disabled the security system and stole roughly $104,000 worth of bikes and equipment.

Paul Maggy of King Cycles in Brandon noticed his shop had been gutted and ransacked when he arrived to work early Monday morning.

"It's a sinking feeling to know that somebody just took everything that you worked to build for the last bunch of years," he said.

Upon further review of his surveillance cameras from late Sunday night, Paul noticed a masked man slithering on the floor, out of the way of the motion detectors.

Minutes later the man cut the phone lines and power to the security system before swinging a hammer, effectively taking out the cameras -- all without detection.

"This doesn't look like this was somebody who was upset that they got a bad tune up or something," Paul joked.

What the surveillance video doesn't show is the massive hole the thief cut in the wall separating Paul's workshop and a storage room.

He thinks the thief busted a lock in the storage room then cut another hole in the ceiling in order to peek down into the store to locate the security system.

"They found a spot where they could come through a back wall, came through the wall to my bike shop area and disabled everything," Paul said.

From there, the thief rolled 40 bikes -- ranging in price from $2,000 up to $10,000 -- back through the hole and into a back alley.

"It's basically heartbreaking to see every high-end bike missing from our shop, but that's what's gone," Paul said.

An entire wall of riding gloves, several pairs of riding shorts and pants -- even riding jerseys with the company's logo -- was all stolen.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office dusted for prints but, so far, detectives haven't found anything substantial.