A robber jumped on a man’s motorcycle this week in St. Paul. But the heist was complicated by the fact that he didn’t know how to ride the bike.

It happened Monday about 7:30 a.m. when two men in a Jeep Cherokee, which had been stolen from Minneapolis, flagged down the 28-year-old motorcyclist at Marshall and Cleveland avenues. He stopped on the shoulder, and they drove up and pointed a gun at him.

The man who got on the motorcycle demanded to know how to operate it and the motorcyclist, fearing he would be shot, told the robber how to drive it, said Sgt. Mike Ernster, a St. Paul police spokesman, on Wednesday.

The robber then drove through a red light and crashed into a pick-up truck. The 68-year-old driver went to check on the man on the motorcycle, “thinking this was a normal traffic crash,” Ernster said.

The man who’d been robbed of his motorcycle was close enough to yell a warning to the pick-up driver, telling him the man on the motorcycle had a gun. The suspect then ran to the pick-up truck, got in and drove away.

The Jeep the men arrived in had been stolen from Minneapolis. There were a series of auto thefts and robberies in Minneapolis before the two St. Paul cases.