Bank Robbers: Not the Sharpest Cheese In the Chandelier

Here’s one of my favorite bank robbery stories, requested by Kelli.

In the late afternoon of a summer Saturday afternoon, a man walked into a small branch of a local credit union located just inside the entrance of a Fred Meyer department store. If you are not familiar with Fred Meyer, think Kohls or Target.

The man approached one of the two clerks, indicated he had a weapon in his pocket, although no weapon was seen, and asked for money. The clerk gave him some money and the bad guy walked out of the bank past the line of folks waiting for either clerk. And he walked past the people coming into the Fred Meyer to shop for “what’s on their list that day.” And he walked to his beater van and climbed in.

At this point not only had the silent alarm inside the bank been triggered but there were about a dozen citizens who recognized what had happened and scrambled to their own vehicles to give chase and call 911 on their cell phones.

I was on the radio giving the dozen or so officers updated information on the description and location of the bad guy’s crappy van all the way until the bad guy drove into the parking lot of his condominium. He then walked up to his condo unit.

Moments later officers arrived and surrounded the building. The bad guy hid in his ceiling crawl-space until an officer gave a traditional canine warning (something like “If you don’t come out right now, we’re sending the dog up there and he WILL bite you”) while another officer made loud barking noises (because the actual canine unit was still a long way out) and the bad guy gave up.

It was a thrill to dispatch because stuff like that is always fun but I found “the rest of the story” was worthy as a life lesson for all of you kind readers and your children.

The bad guy in question had a significant substance abuse problem. The night before he had pawned his television for money to buy crack cocaine. His girlfriend had returned home from her night-shift job to find the TV gone. After some argument, she advised her boyfriend that if he did not get her TV back, he was going to be on the receiving end of some domestic violence and would be looking for a place to live.

So Mr. Crackhead looks at his options and decides ROBBING a bank is his only ticket to getting his girlfriend’s TV back. He actually was less afraid of the police and the FBI than he was his girlfriend.

I guess he wasn’t completely stupid.

If there’s a monkey on your back
and want to pawn your stuff for crack,
please make sure before you do
that the stuff belongs to you.


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Picture found here