Widow tired of calls for business says Ed's Cycle Shop is closed

BRAZORIA, Texas (KTRK) -- For decades, Karyn Kadera's husband, Ed, worked on Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

"He was excellent," Kadera told ABC13's Ted Oberg. "There was a guy in San Antonio that had a show Indian (motorcycle) that nobody was allowed to touch and he would bring it down here and drop it off one weekend and pick it up the next, even for just maintenance."

After years of working in Angleton, the couple moved Ed's Cycle Shop to Brazoria. Kadera said Ed listed his cell phone and their home phone number on business listings, and they got calls at all hours of the day and night.

"The guys that knew him knew they could call him at 2 o'clock in the morning and say, 'Hey, I'm broke down,' and he'd go get the trailer and go pick him up," Kadera said.

Ed got Alzheimer's and died a year later in August 2019.

"At his visitation, I had so many people come up and say, 'We lost so much knowledge.' Other dealers would call him and go 'I got this problem,' and he'd be on the phone with them and say 'OK, this is what you do,'" Kadera said.

The shop's been closed for four years, but the business listing for Ed's Cycle Shop remained on Google, Yelp and other websites, so even after Ed died and the shop closed, the calls didn't stop.

"I get maybe two or three a day," Kadera said. "I still will have drunks call me in the middle of the night."

Tired of being woken up by constant calls from people with broken-down motorcycles in need of repairs, Kadera wanted her number removed from Ed's Cycle Shop's online business listings.

She said she tried to reach out to Google herself, with no luck. So, she Turned to Ted.

Our Turn to Ted team reached out to Google, which removed the business listing from Google Maps, so Kadera's phone number and address no longer pop up as a location for motorcycle repairs.

We also reached out to Yelp, which removed the phone number and the business as "closed."

The Real Yellow Pages also removed its listing for Ed's Cycle Shop after we asked about it.

"Fantastic," she said. "I do appreciate that."

Kadera said she doesn't know if it will stop all the calls because several websites have picked up her number, but says that the calls have certainly slowed down.

She also wants the internet to know: "Ed Cycles in Brazoria, formally of Angleton, is permanently closed. Ed passed away three years ago on August the 7th."

Google told us, "Our team looked into this and we've removed the business listing. People can easily share their local knowledge and suggest edits to places on Maps, including marking a business as permanently closed."

Yelp told us any user can mark a business as closed too. The website is a community-driven site, where users can report changes to businesses, including if they're closed.

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