A woman who survived a robbery at a branch of a major bank says she thought she and other unprotected customers in the lobby might be killed when tellers shielded by bullet-resistant glass did not fulfill the intruders' demands for money.
Martha Fennell told the AJC that she and other customers and employees at a Wells Fargo branch lobby in DeKalb County were ordered to the floor by robbers wearing electrical tape like mustaches, who entered with a semiautomatic handgun on April 15 and screamed at people to get on the floor.
The tellers were cut off from the lobby by their windows and by a locked door. The robbers yelled at them: "Open the door, open the door, or someone' s going to die," Fennell said.
"Please God," she remembers thinking. "Open the door. Give them what they want." But she said the tellers didn't react, and the robbers grew agitated. They told the customers to empty their purses and pockets, then, suddenly, left without harming anyone.
A Wells Fargo spokesman says the tellers complied with one of the robbers' demands -- to get on the floor. The spokesman also said confusion reigned during the two-minute incident and that the tellers did not know what, exactly, the robbers wanted them to do.
A police incident report confirms much of Fennell's account. It says three robbers came in screaming, "Get down, this is a robbery! We are not playing!" They grabbed the bank manager from her office and ordered her to open the vault, but she refused, says the report by the DeKalb County Police Department. The robbers put the manager on the floor and ordered people to empty their pockets and said, "If we don't get this door open, we are going to start shooting!"
One of the suspects then said they needed to leave, and they went out the back of the bank to a waiting, white Land Rover.
The FBI said the late afternoon robbery at the Wells Fargo at 2725 Clairmont Road near I-85 was a "very fluid situation." There were at least 20 customers and employees in the lobby when the armed men entered, shouting and kicking doors, said Stephen Emmett, an FBI agent in Atlanta.
One of the robbers shot at a DeKalb County police officer soon after leaving, said Sgt. Adrion Bell, of the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office. A sheriff's fugitive unit captured two of them the next day. Clifford Durham Jr., 37, of Conyers; and his son Clifford Deangelo Jackson, 22, of Stone Mountain, were arrested on South Deshon Road in Lithonia. They were charged with armed robbery and with aggravated assault on an officer, Bell said.
Emmett said two others -- Rashad Marquiz Rogers, 20, of Decatur; and Mark Anthony Zander II, 21, of Lithonia -- also were apprehended. He said all four were in federal custody, facing federal bank robbery charges and charges involving the use of a weapon in a crime.
Fennell said she called Wells Fargo afterward to learn if it was the company's policy to ignore the demands of angry armed men. "If that's the case," she said, "they need a sign on the door that says, ‘Enter at your own risk.'"
When asked about that, Wells Fargo spokesman Jay Lawrence told the AJC that he could not disclose company policy because disclosure "helps bank robbers." But he said the tellers followed policy. "I will say that what they're told is to do what is necessary to keep everyone safe," he said.
Should the public be wary about doing their business in places where they could become victims? Crime is always a risk, but experts say banks and other institutions that deal with cash in a public setting have used data over the years to evolve detailed emergency plans that prioritize safety over money. They say company policies generally value life more than they did in a prior era.
Years ago, some companies took a hard line with robbers, refusing to comply with their demands, said Dean Dabney, an associate professor of criminal justice at Georgia State University. They wanted to send a message that they wouldn't negotiate with bad guys and that robbery attempts were futile, said Dabney, who studies private security. In many cases, those policies led to violent deaths and lawsuits, he said. "There was an era when retailers tried to take that stance, but they learned the hard way: the message wasn't worth the payout."
Security consultant Chris McGoey said the industry standard today is to protect people, whatever the cost. "Everyone is trained to cooperate, to comply with the robbers' demands," he said. McGoey, who runs a Los Angeles based security consulting firm, said Wells Fargo maintains a good reputation for security and training though he said he didn't know the details of their emergency plans.
Despite training, employees are human and may not follow policy, he said. "Some of them, frankly, will just panic, hit the floor, run out the door, while everyone else is left holding the bag," he said. "Some people freeze in place, some people wet their pants, some people run screaming. People do all sorts of crazy things."
Emmett, the FBI agent, said the Wells Fargo employees "dealt with a dynamic and intensely stressful situation as best as they could." And Lawrence, the Wells Fargo spokesman, said the tellers -- he referred to them and the other bank employees as "team members" -- were confused by the robbers' simultaneous demands to hit the deck and to open the door.
"We regret what our customers went through," Lawrence said. "We regret what our team members went through. But nobody got injured."
Fennell, who said she is no longer a Wells Fargo customer, said the robbers' demands were clear: open the door and hand over money. "The tellers chose not to open it, and luckily no one died," she said. Though the incident ended well, she is an unhappy former customer.
"I don't know what the procedure was," Fennell said, "but that procedure seems faulty."
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