On Dec. 31, Carah Pennington paid a $50 deposit for what a Rifle-based bicycle shop called a “free” e-bike.
Bear Trail Bikes told her it would take four to 12 weeks to deliver and be no charge thanks to Colorado’s e-bike tax credit program, which pays for up to $225 toward a new cycle.
Six months later, the Westminster resident is still without her wheels.
“I think they’re just scamming people,” Pennington told BusinessDen. She hasn’t gotten an update from the business in months.
Hundreds of Reddit posts, Google reviews and posts on Bear Trail’s Better Business Bureau page detail similar experiences.
But they’re not the only ones who question Bear Trail or say the company owes them money.
The company’s former landlord in Lakewood sued Bear Trail last month. And previous owners are skeptical about a sudden surge in sales — and sought a restraining order against the man they sold it to.
That man, Takuma Keita Owuo-Hagood, appears to have made headlines 15 years ago when U.S. armed forces found him in Afghanistan with the Taliban.
“Our job is just to get people their bikes,” Owuo-Hagood told 9News in April. “That is our overall objective. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re not doing anything else.”
Owuo-Hagood did not return requests for comment from BusinessDen for this article.
Former owner cuts ties, moved office
Paul and Pam McKee founded Bear Trail Bikes in Rifle in 2023. They sold the business to Owuo-Hagood for $92,000 in late summer 2025, according to court records.
He kept the McKees on staff, in part because of their knowledge of Colorado’s e-bike tax credit program. Shops have to keep track of spending and submit affidavits to the Colorado Energy Office, which runs the program, to be eligible for the $250 income tax credit.
The McKees, who declined to comment for this article, continued sending tax information and other documents to the state after Owuo-Hagood took over. But Owuo-Hagood wasn’t doing everything by the book, the McKees told Garfield County Court last fall.
The McKees said that, within a month or two of owning Bear Trail, Owuo-Hagood was selling an “extremely high volume” of bikes far beyond the 50 a quarter they had sold during their ownership. Owuo-Hagood also was operating in the Denver metro area without a business license there and wasn’t charging the right amount of sales tax, they alleged.
In a letter emailed to Owuo-Hagood on Oct. 16, a lawyer for the McKees ended the quasi-employment arrangement.
“You have not provided the McKees with information satisfactory to meet the affidavit obligations under the Ebike Rebate Program,” Kristen Balcom of Garfield & Hecht wrote. “The information you have provided includes duplicate entries, among other deficiencies.
“Your failure to properly account for the sales in the Ebike Rebate Program further implicates the McKees in potential wrongdoing.”
Owuo-Hagood didn’t receive the message well. According to police logs, at around 5 that evening, he visited the McKees’ daughter’s work and was acting in a “very agitated manner.”
In a November request for a restraining order against Owuo-Hagood, Pam McKee wrote that he told her daughter “how her parents had wronged him and that he hoped they had a long suffering death; that he felt God wanted him to make people like her parents (us) suffer.”
Owuo-Hagood was also upset that the McKees removed him from Bear Trail’s checking account, which held $300,000 and they all had access to. It was still in the McKees’ name, court documents show, because they were still handling the records for the state’s e-bike program.
The McKees said they were holding the money to protect themselves, since the alleged illegal dealings were technically tied to the account in their name, according to filings. Owuo-Hagood later told a detective they were “holding the money for ransom” to get him to sign the contract.
“You guys stole $300,000 from me and now you guys aren’t answering the phone,” he said in a voicemail to Balcom, the McKees’ lawyer, court documents show. “I’m going to blow your phones up all day long.”
Balcom told Owuo-Hagood the $300,000 would be returned when he signed the contract releasing the McKees of their duties under the sale agreement.
Pam McKee, who received a temporary restraining order but was denied a permanent one, had an office above Bear Trail’s shop. But she told the court she moved her office elsewhere in the 10,000-person town of Rifle.
Empty bike boxes, ripped drywall and old doughnuts
Owuo-Hagood is also feuding with his former landlord in Lakewood, where Bear Trail briefly had another bike shop to have a hub on the Front Range.
Saeid Ghaemi, who owns the building at 1549 Wadsworth Blvd., agreed to a five-year lease with Owuo-Hagood last November.
Earlier this month, Ghaemi sued Owuo-Hagood, saying he’d paid only three months of his $5,500 rent. Ghaemi said he hadn’t been paid since February.
On Instagram, Bear Trail said it moved out of the building in early April because of a break-in that forced its relocation to a unit near Denver’s Kennedy Golf Course. When a BusinessDen reporter visited the Lakewood building last week, it was littered with trash, moldy food, knocked down walls and empty bike boxes.
Ghaemi, who also owns a car dealership next door, declined to discuss the case, citing its pending nature.
In the lawsuit, he alleges that Bear Trail altered the 4,200 square feet without his permission, racking up a $30,000 to $50,000 bill to restore it to its original form. Ghaemi claims he’s owed an additional $20,000 for a storefront window that wasn’t fixed after a car hit the building.
In total, he’s asking the court for around $90,000 from Bear Trail and Owuo-Hagood.
When a BusinessDen reporter visited the new outpost at 10101 E. Hampden Ave., it was also closed. A property manager, who declined to be identified, said the shop lasted only a month there. Bear Trail’s original Rifle store also appears inactive. The company website says it’s open only during “scheduled distribution and pickup days.”
‘I don’t think anybody’s going to get their money back’
Pennington, the Westminster resident still waiting for her bike, isn’t optimistic she’ll get her money back.
She’s trying to recoup the $50 she put down on the bike through her debit card company, but said Bear Trail is trying to block that. That’s despite Owuo-Hagood telling 9News in April that anyone who didn’t want to wait could contact the company for a full refund.
In that interview, Owuo-Hagood blamed the delays in customers receiving bikes on the state failing to release the tax credits on time.
He’s not the first bike shop owner to express frustration with how the state is dispersing that money. A news story from the local CBS affiliate detailing an Erie store’s experience is prominently shown on Bear Trail’s website. A pop-up on the site also says Bear Trail is pausing all its “free” bike orders until it finishes fulfilling the ones it already has.
Pennington, along with hundreds of others, isn’t holding her breath.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to get their money back,” she said.
The Colorado attorney general is investigating Bear Trail, according to a source with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity. A spokesman for the AG’s office declined to comment.
The Colorado Energy Office, which administers the tax credit program, told BusinessDen it is looking “very closely” at complaints about the company and encouraged affected customers to file a complaint with the attorney general.
“Like with other tax credits, a sale (including delivery) must be completed prior to claiming the tax credit,” Colorado Energy Office spokesman Josh Chetwynd said in a statement. “The State does not pay retailers in advance of the e-bike sale and delivery to the customer.”
‘He was giving the Taliban a lot of information’
Owuo-Hagood, who lives in Centennial, also owns an HVAC, plumbing and electrical company called TKO Electrical.
But a court filing made in connection with the restraining order points to a wild past.
Among the materials the McKees’ attorney submitted to the court was a 2010 story in The New York Times. It details how a man named Takuma Owuo-Hagood, then a baggage handler for Delta Airlines, found himself holed up with the Taliban on a trip that year to Afghanistan.
Owuo-Hagood claimed he was abducted by the terrorist group and escaped to the U.S. military after months in captivity, the newspaper reported. Owuo-Hagood said he had business aspirations in Afghanistan and was attracted by what The Times described as “untapped mineral wealth.”
But the Taliban tells a much different story. The group told The Times that the Muslim convert came to them to learn about their way of life.
“He was giving the Taliban a lot of information on a military level,” the Times quoted a Taliban commander saying. “For example, where you have to shoot the American.”
Along with the national headlines, the situation has been cited in several academic papers on aviation terrorism and preventing insider threats.
“I am just happy that he is back home and praying that he got some valuable lessons from this,” Owuo-Hagood’s father told the New York Times over 15 years ago. “And praying there will be good coming out of it.”
