Smoking e-bike bandit busted by Halifax police in yurt: ‘I’m going to kill you’

An electric bike owner thwarted a violent armed robber from stealing his ride Wednesday in Dartmouth.

The attempted robbery took place in the parking lot of a Jamieson Street apartment building in central Dartmouth around 4:15 p.m.

“I heard yelling – ‘Call 911, help, help,’” said one witness, who didn’t want to be identified.

“So, I started filming because I couldn’t really tell what was going on.”

Chris Voysey had noticed two people parked in a small, grey car with New Brunswick plates as he unlocked his e-bike near the corner of Jamieson and Windmill Road a few minutes before the attempted robbery.

‘Sketchy feeling’

“I had a gut feeling that they were not good dudes – there was like a sketchy feeling,” Voysey said. “They pulled out as I was unlocking my bike and they went up Windmill towards the MacKay Bridge. I did a whole 360 watching them.”

Not long after, Voysey was walking back from the grocery store with his partner and infant son when one of the men, armed with a set of bolt cutters, approached him at a run and told him to hand over the e-bike, which he’d been pushing.

“I backed away from him because he was swinging the bolt cutters at me,” Voysey said.

The robber threatened him.

“He said, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ at one point when we were tussling.”

Voysey said he jumped on the robber to prevent injury.

‘Matter of survival’

“He had the bolt cutters up in the air and he was going to bring them down on me,” Voysey said.

“It was just a matter of survival. So I just jumped onto him and held onto him so he couldn’t really be swinging at me too well, and tried to get him down to the ground. I didn’t really have any plan. I was just trying to survive.”

The robber lost his bolt cutters as he tumbled down a nearby slope.

“He lost his boots and then ran off to the getaway car,” said Voysey, a part-time public school teacher, who handed the boots over to police.

Head nicked

Voysey wasn’t badly hurt during the tussle.

“I’m actually not too worse for the wear,” he said Thursday. “He managed to nick the back of my head, not even enough to require stitches.”

Paramedics checked him out at the scene.

“They said my vital signs were good.”

Voysey bought his e-bike used for $1,100.

“I got a decent deal on it,” he said. “I haven’t researched what it would cost new, but I expect it would be close to $3,000.”

Voysey’s now questioning whether he should have stopped the robber.

“Was it the best thing to do at the time? Should I have just let him go? I have mixed feelings about it.”

‘You’re not getting my bike’

His partner and their infant son were only about 15 metres away when the tussle took place.

“An e-bike is not worth a life,” Voysey said. “But I couldn’t see it happen … I was like, ‘No, you’re not getting my bike.'”

Voysey said his partner was “a bit traumatized” by the robbery attempt, but their three-month-old son doesn’t appear to have understood the situation.

“He doesn’t seem to have been marked by it all,” Voysey said.

Halifax Regional Police appear to have arrested the alleged e-bike robber at about 5:30 p.m. That happened at a dome structure outside the DoubleTree Hotel, which is being used as a homeless shelter.

‘Buddy finally gave up’

SaltWire photographer Tim Krochak followed police from the scene of the attempted e-bike robbery to the shelter.

“They banged on the roof of the yurt for half an hour and buddy finally gave up,” said Krochak.

“He still had a smoke hanging out of his mouth.”

Police got a truck to tow a car away from the scene, said the photographer.

“It was the same cops that were at the address on Jamieson,” Krochak said.

Halifax Regional Police said in a news release that they located the getaway car on Wyse Road.

Howard Rhuben John Catley, 36, was scheduled to appear in Dartmouth provincial court Thursday to face charges of robbery, assault with a weapon, and possession of a weapon dangerous to public peace.