Evergreens encircle Bonney Lake, south of Washington State’s Puget Sound. In this town reside some few thousand people—the flanel-wearing, avoid-eye-contact type—and between planned neighborhoods with fancy names like “Ponderosa Estates” and “Rhododendron Park” stands the local high school, which one student described as “Literally in my freshman year and im ready to be done dont send your kid here.” Go Panthers.
Stuck River divides Bonney Lake from the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation; the White River Amphitheater from the flooded schist valley now called Tapps Lake, home of an island-hopping golf course shoulder-to-shoulder with itchy mansions crowded like tenements on the water’s edge. Nothing extraordinary happens in Bonney Lake, aside from the one evening of September 14, 2009.
He stood five-feet-eight, a hefty 240lbs, and balding at the age of 28. He called himself “Dale,” but that was a rouse. His eyes were dark and hollow; he spoke like the walls of an old house. One of Bonney Lake’s high school football players agreed to meet him for an interview at the town’s public library.
Upon introductions, Dale—real name, Sherwin Shayegan—handed the seventeen-year-old footballer a six-page printout of a hundred odd interview questions. Bemused, the teen obliged, answering prompts such as “What is your dream car, and why?” Once his first assignment was complete, Sherwin Shayegan handed him another, prefaced with, “Now I got some funny questions for you but don't laugh.”
The teen looked at the new list, which began with questions like “Have you ever farted during a football game or practice?” and “Have you ever pissed your pants during a football game or practice?” The teen footballer instantly realised he should have vetted “Dale the reporter” before agreeing to an interview. He turned to leave, at which point Sherwin Shayegan jumped on his back and rode him around the library.
The Life and Times of the Piggyback Bandit
Sherwin Shayegan was born to Iranian immigrants on March 31, 1981. He was raised in and around Bothell, Washington—a town I had once called home for the better part of two years. According to his mother, Sherwin has Asperger's syndrome. Now known as “the cool-end of the autism spectrum,” Asperger’s denotes a difficulty with social cues and interaction, often coupled with an intense interest in specific subjects. For Sherwin, that interest was school sports.
He belonged to no cliques in high school, as is apparent in the 2001 Inglemoor High yearbook, for which he was photographed only five times. Aside from his headshot, he made looming appearances in the back row of the team photos for varsity soccer, junior varsity soccer, track & field, and football—all sports for which he was the equipment manager.
This, of course, was mostly in title. Of the football team, the few former players who agreed to an interview couldn’t remember Sherwin doing much managing. His primary occupation was following the team around and doling out high-fives. “Always high fives,” recalled an aging linebacker. “That was his trademark.” That, and milling around the locker room while they dressed, or squirting water into his classmates’ mouths along the sidelines.
On Fridays, when the Inglemoor High football team wore their suits to school, Sherwin dressed-up, too. He vanished into the herd. He was the proverbial fifth wheel, rarely noticed by the sportsmen and otherwise passively accepted. However, sometime near the end of his senior year, circa 2001, Sherwin began asking them for piggyback rides.
***
In his afterschool hours, Sherwin worked part-time at a local clothier. According to his former boss, Sherwin was “definitely somebody that—every minute—we had to identify where he was to make sure he was on path.” If he was tasked with re-lacing a pair of shoes, he would re-lace every pair of shoes within his proximity until he was assigned a new task. “If no one told him to stop vacuuming,” his boss said, “he would vacuum for eight hours. Put it this way: You know ‘Of Mice and Men?’ He’s your Lennie.”
After high school, Sherwin lost access to the sports teams. He was shellshocked and aimless. He tried community college but dropped-out a few weeks into his first semester. He went back home only to find his parents penciling their divorce proceedings. He tried to find boarding in a group home but he was too high-functioning for admission. He was lost.
As a family friend once said, “I can’t put my finger on it, whether it’s autism or there’s something lacking in terms of his emotional development, but he’s stuck in a time warp in terms of being an adolescent and wanting to be accepted and be a part of something.” By the grace of God, Sherwin found occupation north of Seattle, as the Ballard High School football team’s equipment manager. It didn’t pay, but it was nonetheless rewarding.
Ballard’s football team didn’t satisfy him year-round, however, and he began touring Washington State to visit basketball games, soccer scrimmages, lacrosse tournaments, and swim meets during the spring and winter seasons. He’d lurk in the background, approaching coaches and players only for a rare and dire question. He’d then slink back into the shadows, waiting for the end of the game, when he could steal a quick piggyback ride on the sturdy shoulders of a player—an easily-imperceptible effort in the frenzy of an exuberant crowd.
At numerous events he’d ask to be a waterboy, and at most events he’d be turned-down. He was always alone, on the sidelines or in the crowd, wearing a team jersey he acquired from God-knows-where—likely lifted from the team bench while inquiring about the open waterboy position. “No girlfriend,” recalled one team’s sponsor. “No wife. Not even a buddy. Just a total loner. I was telling my wife, ‘This just ain’t right.’ He just didn’t seem right.”
Washington State soon grew too small for Sherwin. He was caught sticky-fingered with more than just jerseys—body spray; lip balm; single-serving bags of Fritos—and was subsequently banned from a series of drugstores, grocers, chain restaurants, and sports venues between Spokane and Seattle. For a long time, piggybacks came second in the concerns of Washington’s administrators—typically attributing the rides to harmless stunts or overexcitement—but that perception changed after Sherwin went to Oregon.
***
In 2009, the Piggyback Bandit took his show on the road and toured the boroughs of the beaver state. High school sporting events in Bend, McMinnville, Klamath Falls, Beaverton, Corvallis, Salem, etcetera, all saw the brows of Sherwin Shayegan poke-up from behind the bleachers. The Piggyback Bandit had crossed state lines and made his burglary of backs—his mounting of twenty-stone burdens onto the bodies of teen ballers—into a federal case.
The Oregon School Activities Association banned him from all in-state games. His photo was soon plastered on the interior of every ticket booth across the Pacific Northwest, under signs saying “DO NOT PERMIT” and “DENY ENTRY.” He traveled east by bus, island-hopping between Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and even Illinois. He’d find a local team game, squeeze into one of their jerseys, pose as an equipment manager, steal a bronco ride from a boy, and roll-on to the next town.
He was charged with fourth-degree assault for climbing that teen footballer in Bonney Lake, but he wasn’t in Washington for the arraignment — he was in Montana. Two detectives were dispatched to find him, as he had been acquiring quite a reputation across northern America. Throughout their investigation, the detectives learned that Sherwin rarely traveled with a suitcase. He took busses using cash he panhandled for. He had no ID; no cellphone.
In February, they gained access to his hotel room in Helena, finding an archive of manila folders neatly stacked on a queen-sized bed: case-studies of local teen basketball and hockey players, featuring everything from photos and addresses to favorite foods and television shows. Upon his arrest, he professed that everything he had accumulated could freely be found on the internet. “That’s public information!” he screamed, “I can have that!”
Sherwin Shayegan, first mugshot
Sherwin had thought Great Falls would be a clandestine operation, but the clerk at his hotel had recognized him from her previous job—a hotel in Oregon—and she remembered the news reports that followed his visit. She phoned the police. Two plainclothes detectives drove to the nearest soccer field and blended with the crowd; the home team was up by two. Their fans were cheering. Among them, wearing a white T-shirt with “CMR Varsity Boys Soccer” scrawled across in permanent marker, was the 260lb Sherwin Shayegan.
The ref blew the final whistle; the crowd roared; Sherwin stormed the field. He gave a fist-bump to a player and, as the kid turned his back, Sherwin mounted him, and smiled. “You’ll never forget watching him get off that kid’s back,” recalled one of the detectives, “and the look on his face; he could have been masturbating. Honestly, that’s the look on his face.”
The two detectives approached Sherwin on the field; they were grinning as if they had ensnared a true sasquatch. One officer called Sherwin’s name, and the roly-poly man froze, turning around, eyes empty. The officer then shouted, almost gleefully, “You’re the Piggyback Bandit!”
At the station, the detectives wanted to go for the maximum charge—a sex crime, of some sort—presuming it was a pedophilic fetish, based on “a gut feeling that it’s sexually motivated.” The one officer accused him of “liking little boys and everything,” but Sherwin denied it. In the end, the most they could charge him for was assault.
He was fined $730 and given a one-year suspended sentence, with the stipulation he return home. The Montana High School Sports Association issued a harsher punishment, banning Sherwin from all of the state’s future sports games. “What's disturbing to me is that he is jumping on our young athletes,” said the organization’s executive director, regarding Sherwin’s heft and girth. “He can hurt someone.”
***
“Go back to Seattle and behave,” the judge said, issuing his probation. But Sherwin had dozens of outstanding warrants back west, including nine in his hometown; he wasn’t intending to return to Washington. Instead, he went further east. In Bismark, North Dakota, he visited Century High School clad in their athletic apparel. “He helped lay out uniforms, got water. He even gave a couple of kids shoulder massages,” recalled the basketball coach. “Creepy stuff like that.”
Everyone presumed Sherwin was with somebody else. When the final whistle blew, he asked a player for a piggyback ride. “He made himself appear as if he's limited or handicapped,” argued the coach. “I think he plays an empathy card.” The kid acquiesced, and Sherwin rode him towards the sunset. That same night, he stole a piggyback ride from a hockey player at the local ice rink. “We didn't realize what we were dealing with until several days later.”
North Dakota subsequently banned him from their school sporting events, too, and he went on to Minnesota. In Minneapolis, he squatted on three of Concordia University’s basketball games. Versus St. Olaf’s, he portrayed the waterboy, at one point getting touchy-feely with the players. The coach barked, and Sherwin left the game without climbing a person or getting off.
He milled around Minneapolis and St. Cloud for a week, frequenting their high school sporting events, though no bodies were ridden and no high-fives were given. When the Minnesota State High School League heard about Concordia v. St. Olaf’s, they banned him, too.
Further east he traveled, as west only held shackles for the Piggyback Bandit. He was wanted for a laundry list of mischief including, as ESPN tallied, “multiple counts of criminal trespass, vehicle prowling, resisting arrest, and a felony possession of controlled substance without a prescription.” And then there were the assaults — the unrequited piggyback rides; the modern-day rodeo, and the wilding of the West.
***
Sherwin was becoming too well-known. He was balding, to his innocuous advantage, but with age he seemed evermore out-of-place on the pitch. He adapted, shifting his disguises from the home team to the road team. In the other team’s colors, the home crowd would presume he was an out-of-towner, meaning hawk-eyed parents and rolodex coaches were less likely to notice the imposter in their midst. He had become a phantom; a phantom that serves water cups to road boys.
“He would just wander around. You wouldn't see him interacting with coaches and players when we were first aware of him,” recalled the executive director of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association. “He's certainly socially awkward in any social setting, but he's also not afraid to approach people. It doesn't take very long to find out he's a little bit different.”
“What people don't realize is that he's very smart. He knows how to play the system. He just knows what to say and how to say it.” The home team thought he was with the away team; the away team thought he was a mentally disabled man assigned to them as a waterboy. “He slides through the cracks that way.” After Spokane won the state title, back in 2008, Shayegan rallied his way into their locker room, blending-in with the crowd by wearing a pilfered jersey. “He was jumping on players’ backs after they showered and came out of the locker room.”
When he was arraigned in Helena, Sherwin questioned the deputy city attorney assigned to him on how long, approximately, he would be locked-up if convicted. The attorney was perplexed by Sherwin’s badgering and precision until, he realized, Sherwin “was trying to plan his schedule.” When the judge deferred the sentence to probation, Sherwin’s eyes lit-up.
Piggyback Bandit, incognito, at Century High
The one security camera to ever photograph the elusive Piggyback Bandit was in Bismarck. School staff didn’t recognize him because he was dressed for the “CATS,” and home team Century High were the “PATRIOTS.” “At halftime,” the Cats coach blushed, “he apparently was in our locker room handing out water,” folding jerseys, and massaging boys’ shoulders.
In a separate event at Century High, after the Patriots hockey team won their match, Sherwin was seen “acting unusually” in the halls, leading onlookers to presume he had special needs. After gathering up the courage, Sherwin knocked on the home team’s locker room door and “asked if one of our players could come out for a picture,” recalled the Patriots’ coach. “Then he stuck his head in the officials' room and started yelling… When we got him out of there, he jumped on the player's back."
High schools across North Dakota went on high-alert. “We're distributing his picture to everybody,” said a state employee. “We had it at the front table and the hockey ticket booth [and] we're posting it at every entrance.” “I know he's been the butt of a lot of jokes, but the fact of the matter is this is serious. We're dealing with a sick individual who needs professional help.”
In a 2012 article for Time Magazine, one girl opined that “actually, we should all feel sorry for the Piggyback Bandit.” “Sherwin Shayegan likes piggyback rides,” she wrote. “He really, really likes them. So much so that he has been banned from five states for jumping on the backs of unsuspecting high school athletes.” She went on to argue that Sherwin is “misunderstood,” rather than what “some suggest” is the relishing of “a fetish of sorts.”
According to the Daily Beast, earlier that year, “Shayegan’s now-defunct Facebook page read, ‘Give me a piggyback ride!’ and that he wants to meet ‘good looking boys. Preferably at libraries when no one else is around.’” The reporter went on, wondering, “Is Shayegan mentally ill or just an annoying eccentric?” This seems to be the root question behind our fascination with the Piggyback Bandit, and while the available evidence leans in favor of the former—mental illness—Sherwin offered a third option at his court appearance in Helena, in the form of an excuse: “I made a mistake. I was just trying to be funny and get a piggyback ride.”
***
Three hours east on I-94 took Sherwin from Bismarck to Fargo. There, he strode into North High, Room 102, where the basketball coach was hosting an orientation for the team’s incoming freshmen. “I had fifty-five kids in the room,” recalled the coach. “This gentleman walks in the door and stands in the back. As soon as I finish, he ran up to me; he had a wad of cash in his hand. It was rolled up and on the outside was a $20 bill. I said, ‘Whoa, what’s your name?’ He told me he was a North graduate and wanted to donate to the program.”
“I walked him outside the room and proceeded to ask him questions… He explained to me that he was a Special Olympian. There was some basketball game he was going to play in; he really wanted to wear North High gear.” The coach didn’t believe him—the Asperger’s argument didn’t seem to hold-up with a Special Olympics invitation—but he acquiesced to the wonky-eyed philanthropist and gave him a North High basketball jersey.
The coach returned to Room 102, to finish his orientation, but Sherwin didn’t leave. “He waited outside our room… Then he jumped on back of one of my freshman players [and] he proceeded to yell, ‘Wheeeee!’” and into the night he vanished… Three months later, after the Concordia v. St. Olaf game, Sherwin went to a nearby Applebee’s (When you’re here, you’re family) and pestered patrons to borrow a cellphone. One of these patrons, incidentally, was North High’s basketball coach, having traveled over an hour southeast for a game of his own.
“Remember me?” the coach asked, but Sherwin drew a blank. The coach described their first encounter, three months prior in Fargo, to which Sherwin furrowed his brow, blushed, and ran away. The next morning, the coach spotted Sherwin in the North High principal’s office, “sitting in a chair with a typed-up apology letter.” It read, and I quote:
I would like to appoligize to you guys I made a mistake and I hope you guys will forgive me but after I am done talking to you guys you guys will probably trespass me like 98% of schools and school districts did in Washington, Oregon, and Montana. Weather you guys trespass me or not I probably don’t think after today it will be a good idea for me to come to your campus.
A week later, the coach received a parcel in the administration office: Sherwin had returned his North High basketball jersey before moving on, east, toward St. Cloud.
The heat was on. Detectives in Fargo determined the identity of the bus taking Sherwin to St. Cloud. They contacted the city’s school district who then disseminated Sherwin’s mugshot, long-before the bus arrived. Once in town, Sherwin marched to the nearest high school, breached the gymnasium doors, purchased a $6 ticket for a basketball game, and took a seat on the bleachers. A science teacher immediately recognized the Piggyback Bandit by his profile, and he informed the principal, who went to see for himself…
“One thing I noticed that seemed strange,” recalled the principal, “is that he had a cloth-covered diary, 8½-by-11-inch size, and had begun to write in it.” The principal gathered a harem of eight other teachers and approached the dormant Piggyback Bandit. “I’m sorry, sir,” the principal told him, “we’re going to have to ask you to leave.” Sherwin seemed devastated.
“I just got here!” he shouted, before acquiescing—afraid of the penalties and shame that could be imposed by adults. “He was a little surprised at first,” the principal said, “like, why would we be asking him to leave, when he just got there? It just took a beat or two, and he must have realized we knew who he was. We had no reason to think there was any real cause for concern—he bought a ticket…and was exhibiting proper behavior; he wasn’t doing a darn thing wrong—beyond that we would just as soon not have him at our basketball game.”
Arm-in-arm, a half-dozen teachers walked Sherwin out of their school. His $6 ticket was refunded. It seemed this new tactic of theirs—vigilance and a preemptive strike—was the best [if only] way to keep the Piggyback Bandit from stealing joyrides from their boys. A precedent had been set: Nobody rides for free in Fargo, St. Cloud, Helena, or Bonney Lake.
***
His ban now totaled one tenth of America, for over 15% of the nation’s contiguous land area. Still, he pressed onward, sneaking into high school locker rooms across the country, hounding teen ballers for autographs, photographs, and piggyback rides; sometimes in exchange for money, though typically without warning, and usually preceded by some form of beverage dispensation, shoulder massage, or high-five.
There’s a disagreement among lowbrow academics—the eccentric cultural anthropologists and meddlesome e-psychologists—regarding Sherwin Shayegan’s modus operandi. Some believe he’s “developmentally delayed” whereas others liken him to a wolf in sheep’s clothing: “smart; knowing exactly what to say and when to say it.”
As the bandit once said, “I know my reputation is something that’s kind of difficult for me.” Sherwin “didn’t mean to cause any problems” — he is simply a connoisseur of the piggyback.
***
His travels have been sporadic since the Shakedown in St. Cloud. He returned to Washington, for a spell, scoring bronco rides in the Spokane area. According to a 2017 article in the city’s newspaper, he spooked youth at the North Central, Mead, Rogers, and Ferris high schools, by being “disruptive” and “forward with students” until he was forced to leave. “Shayegan was reported to have sat behind the boy’s basketball team’s bench and, at one point, gave players back rubs,” which was later confirmed by a cellphone video recording.
In 2013, during a basketball game in Illinois, Sherwin was seen beside the bleachers, wearing Sandburg College regalia. “He had a red shirt on and I assumed he was with Carl Sandburg or a fan of theirs,” recalled the coach of the home team, Black Hawk College. “In between games, he walked behind the Sandburg benches and started filling water cups so I thought they had a manager or someone helping them out. He was taking their warm-ups and folding them up — everything a manager would do. He sat right next to the scores table with a stat sheet, so we figured he was charting fouls or something. Nothing probably would have been said until after the game when we had an incident.”
“He came into the locker room after we were changing,” recalled the Black Hawk power forward, “and he said he wanted to take a picture with me and I said that was fine. Then he said for the picture that he wanted to get on my back and I was thinking it was kind of awkward, but I said ‘that's fine’ and he got on my back.” “Then, he knocked on the door to the officials' locker room, made a derogatory comment to them, and ran away.” The Black Hawk coach asked the Sandburg coach why their equipment manager had acted so inappropriately in their locker room, to which the Sandburg coach replied, “That’s not our equipment manager.” In fact, he “had never seen the guy before.”
Sherwin was subsequently banned from the cities of Moline, Galesburg, Champaign, and Chicago, Illinois. In Bettendorf, Iowa, two days prior, Sherwin caused a kerfuffle at a bar called “Muddy Waters” before crossing the street to a motel, where he tried to reserve a room but couldn’t produce the identification necessary to do so. He then trolled the McDonald’s down the road, asking patrons for food and money, and then sought refuge in the Schnuck’s grocery store across the parking lot. According to the area’s local ABC affiliate, the grocery store manager “told Shayegan several times to leave after he was ‘causing a disturbance and trying to steal a customer’s food.’ Shayegan reportedly made loud noises and shouted inside the store, interrupted store employees, and told them how to do their jobs. Despite being told to leave and stay out of the store, Shayegan reportedly went back into the store and stayed there.” He was jailed for fifteen hours, according to his arrest record, for the misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct, ultimately being released on a bond of $300.
He was arrested again, the following year, for jumping two kids at a basketball game in Fauquier County, Virginia. According to NBC’s affiliate in DC, Sherwin was “charged with two counts of assault and battery and one count of obstructing an officer after allegedly touching two high school players in the visitor's locker room at Kettle Run High School.”
Mere days prior, Sherwin had been arrested in nearby Loudoun County after he “grabbed the arm of a juvenile victim and attempted to have him go into a locker room at the hockey rink” during a local high school game. For this he was found guilty of assault and battery, sentenced to twelve months in jail (with ten suspended), and required to submit to a mental health evaluation upon his release. His mother pleaded for leniency.
“As a mother, I have to tell you, he is a very good person.” She argued that Sherwin “never hurt anybody in his life;” that he was a misunderstood boy with Asperger’s who is simply “reliving his years as a high school sports team manager.” “He is a really, really big sports fan,” she said. “He knows all the players’ names. He knows the score… I don’t understand why they’re making up this kind of story. He is not a piggyback rider, so far as we know.”
***
In October, 2018, Sherwin tread the rugged hills of northern Alabama to Falkville, where he photographed some of the local high schoolers at their pep rally. Hours later, the Falkville Blue Devils won their football match, and Sherwin stormed the field. He climbed aboard a footballer, riding him like a ponyboy until he got tossed off. Rising to his feet, Sherwin handed the boy a folded piece of paper and ran away.
The boy unraveled the paper, which held a $20 bill—likely a gratuity—and a note, saying he had a nice bum and looked good in his shorts. Confused, the boy gave the note to his mom, and she immediately called the police.
Detectives were able to get a trace on Sherwin's cellphone (a recent purchase, sent to him by his mother in Washington) and were able to outline Sherwin's travels over the past few days. It seemed he had recently ordered an Uber for an hour's drive south to Hoover. After identifying the driver, police learned that, upon his arrival to the given pick-up location (a Walmart), the driver saw Sherwin hounding folk at the entryway for piggyback rides.
***
Earlier that year, in North Carolina's Charlotte Douglas International Airport, a twenty-year-old man found Sherwin Shayegan's meaty hands on his shoulders. The young man wriggled out of Sherwin's grasp and was promptly handed an envelope upon which was written “CHARLOTTE.” As Sherwin ran away, the man opened the envelope to find a $10 bill and a note reading “This is money for letting me give you a massage. Thank you.”
The man instantly knew he had been body-burgled by the Piggyback Bandit, as he had seen—weeks earlier, on the news—a similar incident regarding a teen in Newark's Liberty International Airport…
In December, 2017, a fourteen-year-old boy was waiting at the luggage carousel with his parents, having returned home from their holiday getaway. While his father was retrieving their bags, the boy felt a sudden burden upon him: Sherwin had latched onto his shoulders and was massaging his body. As the father turned around, Sherwin dropped an envelope and ran away.
The envelope had “NEWARK” written on the front. Inside was a $10 bill and a note reading “This is money for letting me give you a massage. Thank you.” It seemed the Piggyback Bandit's modus operandi had changed, again, and now he was facing charges of child endangerment.
Detectives eventually tracked him to a hotel near the airport. In his room, they found a series of “disturbing notes” and $10 bills stuffed into envelopes, all of which were labeled with the names of various American airports.
On the Atlantic coast of New Jersey, in 2012, Sherwin was spotted on the bleachers of Ramapo College. “I thought I recognized him in the crowd,” said the college’s athletic director, “but I said, no way, he couldn’t be all the way out here.” However, “at the end of the game, he rushed the court and jumped on two players’ backs at once.”
“With that smile on his face, I could tell this was his nirvana—and, you know what, I liked it. Instead of forcing him out, we decided to embrace him at Ramapo. We hired him to do it every game, for every men’s sport except for tennis because tennis isn’t really a sport at Ramapo. And he doesn’t even expect pay… [He] says being paid in piggyback rides is all a man can ask for.”