Time to turn back the clock to 2002... I was just not quite married and out of college for a year and had been working at a local bank for about 10 months. Didn't make a ton of money, but the hours were good, the job was easy, my commute was 4 minutes and I worked with some great people.
I was spending half my time in the loan department and half my time behind the teller line. One fine spring day in May I was covering the teller line during lunch and a scruffy looking gentlemen walked in. Didn't think much of him because we did a lot of check cashing for construction workers and such.
He walked over to my window and handed me a white paper bag that just said "FILL BAG". At first I thought it was a joke, after a double take I realized that it wasn't and did as instructed.
Unfortunately for him, I had spent most of the day in the loan department and had very little to fill the bag with.
The bank officer working the lobby immediately noticed something was wrong and started to come over to see what was going on. I gave him the bag and he abruptly turned around and quickly walked out the door. She followed him to the door to try to get the license plate (he wasn't completely stupid and had removed them).
As soon as he turned around I tripped the alarm, tried as discreetly as possible to signal the other tellers and pulled out my victim sheet (a paper with a fill in the blank about what happened to you and what he looked like and what the getaway car looked like, etc.)
The two friends that I worked with on the teller line were in a heated debate over a game of Simpsons Chess and didn't realize that anything was wrong until he had gotten to the door.
The police and the FBI descended upon us. I was interviewed four or five times and then my boss sent me home with a bottle of wine (which I promptly drank, chased by another).
The next day I decided that my cushy job at the bank wasn't as cushy as I thought and marched my resume over to my next door neighbor that had been hounding me to come work with her (same place I work now).
Fast forward to September. Sitting at my new job (still working at the bank on weekends for play money) I get a call from the US Marshalls office. They found the guy and needed to send the FBI over to see if I was fit to testify. Ok. Sure. I ask my new boss to use a conference room the following afternoon and the black suits come marching in (awesome probationary impression I'm sure).
December rolls around and I take a day off to sit at the Federal Court Building and testify to that jerkwad face to face. The trial was a worse experience than actually getting robbed. They brought in a few people from each of the banks so I had some moral support. While I testified my moral support got the goods from the other witnesses in the room (I wasn't allowed to talk to them) and it turns out that this guy's girlfriend turned him in after he ticked her off, turns out he had robbed four banks and been dumb enough to brag about it. She got to testify too.
Trial over. Four guilty verdicts rendered and my moral support took me out for tequila. Sentencing judge gave him 1033 months (just over 86 years) with five years of probation to follow (go judge) no parole (federal money stolen and he was armed).
Justice served right?
I was pretty happy with it.
The reason this comes up now... the Department of Justice has a program where they have to tell you (as a victim) what happens with the prisoner throughout his life in the system. Well yesterday I got a letter from the folks at the DOJ letting me know that while not eligible for parole this lovely repeat offender has qualified for placement in a 'community program' until his sentence is up.
Apparently sentenced to 80 years with no parole plus probation really means the jerk bank robber sits in low security prison for less than 10 years and gets put in a halfway house 'under supervision' for the rest.
What a giant pile of crap. So much for doing your time, you do part of it and get introduced back into society with government funding.
Grrrrrrrrr
No comments:
Post a Comment