Deputies Locate Stolen Motorcycle, Car

Wilkes sheriff deputies recovered a stolen motorcycle and a stolen car over the weekend. The story of the found car is simple, but the motorcycle...well, that's a different matter. A Maryland man who tells deputies he comes here every weekend to work on an abandoned house on Parks Ridge Road says he was hard at it on Saturday, when the friend that was helping him asked when he'd gotten a motorcycle. He doesn't own one -- but sure enough, there set one in the living room of the abandoned house. A deputy worked for a couple of hours to track down the owner, first finding out the state had it registered to a man in Winston-Salem. Then he found out the man had traded it to a motor sports dealer for a jet-ski. The dealer confirmed this, and said two men with sacks of money came in and bought the motorcycle for cash. He had the name of one of them, and that man lives in North Wilkesboro. So the deputy called the local number -- but the man who answered the phone said he didn't know the person the deputy was asking for. When he identified himself as a deputy, the man hung up the phone and would not answer it. So the motorcycle, a Honda CR-1000 model worth 10-thousand dollars, is locked up, waiting for the owner to claim it.

As for the car, a couple of deputies spotted it sitting in a driveway in Ronda, after it had been reported stolen out of NOrth Wilkesboro. The owner, Marco Aponte, came and picked up the car after deputies looked through it. They found a wallet in the driver's seat, and are looking for the man whose ID they found, Michael Swaim. The house where the car was parked belongs to a relative of his, and she says he disappeared after parking the car in her driveway.