Update: Boy's Missing Bionic Arm, Thought to be Stolen, Back in its Rightful Hand

posted Oct. 29, 2014; updated Oct. 30

Samuel Luther and his family thought someone had stolen his $95,000 bionic prosthetic arm and hand, and they appealed to local news media in an effort to get the limb back.

And that worked — although it turns out the arm wasn’t stolen at all.

The 16-year-old North Aurora boy left his arm at a Chicago Subway restaurant where he and his family ate lunch a week ago. After stories appeared in The Aurora Beacon-News, NBC Chicago, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, the publicity prompted a student at a nearby school who had seen the arm to call police.

The student said kids who work at the Subway on Halsted Street near the UIC campus were in the street playing with the arm.

The Subway manager told the Chicago Tribune Thursday morning that a staffer found the arm on a bench, and police came by and picked it up at about 8 a.m.

“I thought it was a toy,’’ Jamie Gordon told the Tribune. “Now that I know it’s not a toy I feel better.”

The arm, a BeBionics 3, is billed as the world’s most advanced prosthetic hand. Samuel, born without a left arm, has had the mechanical one for a year after using regular prosthetics his entire life.

The arm disappeared on Oct. 18. The family believed it was stolen in Pilsen while Samuel attended a teen modeling class at K Models Talent, according to his dad. That’s what prompted the publicity blitz.

“Those kids at the Subway were not looking at giving it up,” Derrick Luther told the Tribune, praising the police who retrieved it for him. “They would have went out of their way to contact the police the day it happened.”