Bruce Windsor Joins a Growing List of Recession Criminals Under Financial Strain Who Seek Quick Cash by Robbing Banks

Church deacon and bank robber Bruce Windsor is back in the news again. You will recall that I blogged about this when the news of his escapade first surfaced. The father of four was a deacon, a youth soccer coach and a volunteer who helped build orphanages in Brazil, but yet, he was so weak that he succumbed to his flesh and donned a mask, wig and sunglasses and tried to rob the Greenville First Bank at gunpoint on February 26. According to a FBI affidavit, he demanded that bank workers fill a bag and two boxes with cash. He wasn't a career criminal. I am revisiting his case because it is part of a dangerous trend in this country -- recession crimes.

Windsor was sinking into a financial hole and rather than do the right thing and seek gainful employment, he sought what seemed as the easy way out -- robbing a bank. He was a real estate investor who ran several property businesses and it is being reported that his financial troubles predated the recession but were magnified as the housing bubble burst and access to credit dried up. Mr. Windsor's story isn't new. In fact, it's a disturbing and growing trend. He has found himself among a crowd of unlikely suspects -- seemingly ordinary people from ministers to ex-law enforcement workers who cite financial duress as the main factors in pushing them into a life of crime, specifically bank robbery to score some quick cash.

Bank holdups aren't as horrendous as the murder-suicides we have heard about lately and have managed to fly under the radar, but industry statistics show they go up during recessions, and experts have said that the financial pressure inevitably pushes some otherwise law-abiding people to find themselves accosting a teller at a window. According to media reports, the latest FBI statistics tallied 1,617 bank robberies in the fourth quarter of 2008, up from 1,358 in the third quarter and 1,561 a year earlier, although there are no statistics that differentiate between first-timers and repeat criminals in bank heists. This is very troubling.

Here are a few cases that have flown under the radar:

• James Creason, former associate pastor at the First Baptist Church of Leesburg, was arrested in August on charges he used a handgun to force tellers to hand over $36,000 at a bank where he was known and where his ex-wife had worked. Creason is being held without bond until his trial. His attorneys have said they plan to pursue an insanity defense.

• Retired Ohio bank teller Barbara Joly was sentenced in February to nine years in prison for robbing four banks. Her attorney said the crimes were attempts to support an adult son who'd fallen on hard financial times. Joly and her husband decided they couldn't afford to give their son any more of their own money, so she robbed the banks to continue to help him financially.

• James Gaddis, 27, a former high school valedictorian, and police patrolman in the southern Illinois university town of Carbondale, was arrested and charged in January with robbing a bank there last October. Prosecutors said Gaddis carried out the crime with a friend because of money troubles as his home faced foreclosure. He is free on $1 million bond and has pleaded not guilty.

• Donald Keith Giammanco was charged with robbing 12 St. Louis banks from November 2007 through last September. The unemployed, single father of twin teenage daughters told police he stole more than $100,000 to provide for his children. He had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in September 2007. Source: Comcast News

We are all experiencing financial strain in different degrees, but I have never thought about pulling up to a bank, entering and pulling out a gun to commit a robbery. This shows desperation based on a "me, me, me" mentality. Times are tough and jobs are disappearing quickly, but there is no justification to take the life of another or rob a bank because one is in the throes of financial hardship. Sorry, there is a better way out.