AUBURN – Until she was 9 years old, Danyell Giroux would sit glumly in her yard watching her two younger sisters ride their bicycles.

She wished she could ride with them, but there was no way.

Danyell, now 12, suffers juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and cannot handle a two-wheeled bike.

“She would just sit out there and watch her sisters ride and ride all day,” said Shelly Bradstreet, Danyell’s mother. “Because of the rheumatoid arthritis, she has balance and gripping issues. We thought she’d never be able to get out there to ride with them.”

Then Shelly found a three-wheeled adult cycle for sale and suddenly, Danyell could do something she had so long done without: She could ride just like her sisters and other kids in the neighborhood.

Until earlier this week, that is. Sometime – probably in the darkest hours of night – someone came along and stole Danyell’s tricycle from the yard. She heard about it while she was attending classes at the YWCA.

“My mom called and told me my bike was gone,” Danyell said. “It just wasn’t there in the morning.”

Also gone were a helmet and a leather purse kept in the bicycle basket.

For Shelly Bradstreet, a single mother who works and attends college, it is not a simple matter of losing an item she had scrimped to buy. The three-wheeled bike was more than just a plaything for her daughter; it was a means of therapy.

“It’s very good for her to ride it,” Shelly said. “It’s good exercise, but it’s not hard on her joints.”

“And,” said Danyell, “I didn’t have to worry about falling off.”

The Bradstreet family lives on the dead-end section of Temple Street. It looks like a quiet area, but teenagers are known to cut through yards there. In the past, vehicles have been broken into. A camera was stolen from one, a canoe from another.

Shelly reported the theft to Auburn police. An officer told her he knew of only two such tricycles in the area.

“I can’t believe someone just got on it and rode off without being noticed,” Shelly said.

She said she was encouraged somewhat by a story about a similar theft. In Lewiston earlier this spring, an 83-year-old woman reported that her childhood bicycle had been stolen. Less than a full day after a story about the theft ran in the newspaper, that woman had her bike back.

“The story was really touching,” Shelly said.

New, an adult tricycle costs between $300 and $500. Shelly paid $150 for the one she bought for her daughter, but she doesn’t have the money to buy another one right away.

For the time being, a friend in Connecticut is bringing up an adult trike over the weekend for Danyell to use. But she would like her own trike back. It is, after all, the only one she’s ever had.

What: Light blue tricycle with back-mounted basket

Who to call: Anyone with information about the stolen tricycle is asked to call Auburn police at 784-7332.

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