PATERSON — Fifteen-year-old Vitzie Salce spent a year selling her arts-and-crafts creations to earn enough money to buy a used mountain bike.

The teenager, who has autism, said she felt happy riding her green bike in her backyard or with her cousins at a park with a duck pond in Fair Lawn.

But on Aug. 2, the teenager learned that someone had stolen her bicycle.

“I felt scared, or sad,” Vitzie said. “I felt both.”

Vitzie’s mother, city activist Raquel Amador, said she contacted police about the theft but doesn’t expect to get the bike back, considering all the other crimes under investigation in the city.

The theft happened during a chaotic confrontation that in some ways typifies the turbulent life facing many residents in Paterson’s 4th Ward.

Amador, who lives on Butler Street, said neighbors told her they saw a man and a woman in the early-morning hours of Aug. 2 walking down the block trying to open car doors. Neighbors said the two looked like “crackheads” searching for something to steal and sell so they could buy more drugs.

One of the neighbors reportedly confronted the man, and soon they were fighting. Amador said she heard the noise from inside her apartment, went to the window and yelled out to the combatants that she was going to call the police.

The stranger called back that he needed help because he was getting beaten up, Amador said. Her neighbor then shouted that he was beating the man because he was a thief.

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At some point, the stranger escaped by climbing over a locked fence that led to Amador’s backyard, she said. The stranger then grabbed her daughter’s bike, threw it over another fence into an adjacent yard, and made off with it through the alley to the next street, Amador said.

Amador said the incident has haunted Vitzie and her two younger children, ages 8 and 6, who now are too frightened to be in the yard by themselves.

“It’s time for me to leave this block. It’s time for me to get out of here,” said Amador, who grew up in the neighborhood. “My kids deserve their peace and their safety.”

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Amador has worked to improve life on her street. For the past two years, she regularly has participated in the public comment portion of City Council meetings, talking about such issues as inadequate police patrols and sloppy garbage collection. Her complaints about traffic dangers helped convince the council to make Butler a one-way street.

Residents in Amador’s apartment building have used wooden pallets to block the opening that the bike thief used to get inside the backyard. One of her relatives recently gave Vitzie a pink bike that she now uses.

Amador said her daughter has been selling arts and crafts for several years and was accepted to the fine arts program at Paterson’s Rosa Parks high school. She makes decorative key chains and phone chains, earrings and colorful canvas bags, using glitter and glue.

“She’s self-taught,” Amador said of the girl’s work.

“I watch ‘Do it yourself’ videos,” Vitzie said.

The girl sets up shop, selling her items at her father’s weekend baseball games in Paterson. Sometimes Vitzie carries trinkets in her purse and tries to sell them to people she meets on the street, her mother said.

Vitzie said selling her crafts has made her “rich.”

“I feel proud when I sell them,” she said.

Joe Malinconico is editor of Paterson Press.