Who originally stored the comic in that locker—whether they were the thief, a subsequent owner, an uninvolved party who had acquired the comic through some chain of transactions between the theft and the storage—is not established by the public record and was not established by the LAPD investigation as reported. The contemporaneous reporting is consistent on this point: the theft was described as unresolved, the investigation ongoing, and no suspect was named or arrested in the available coverage from 2011.
This matters for an honest account of what happened. The popular framing of this story—stolen comic turns up in storage locker—creates an implicit narrative in which someone put a stolen comic in a storage locker and then lost or abandoned the locker. That may be what happened. But the record does not establish it. The comic could have changed hands multiple times between 2000 and 2011 through persons who did not know its provenance, before ending up in the possession of whoever owned the locker in which it was found. The absence of information about the locker’s renter is not a detail that can be filled by inference.
The ABC News report describes the buyer as someone who had purchased the contents from “American Auctioneers, a Riverside, Calif., company” and that he “later found the comic in the locker and contacted Mark Balelo.” Elisabeth Metzidis, controller for Balelo Inc., confirmed this account to ABC News: the man had asked Balelo to sell the comic on his behalf. Balelo, in turn, reached Fishler. This sequence of intermediaries between the original storage locker contents and the point of recovery is the documented chain—but it begins with an anonymous buyer and a locker of indeterminate origin.