Even When You Do All the Right Things . . .
In Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 22, 2004, two thugs wearing gloves and hooded sweatshirts burst into a branch office of First Fidelity Bank and demanded that all the tellers empty their drawers.

-- The bank had wonderful video surveillance cameras.
-- They were in an office building, not on the main floor, so the branch wouldn't be a typical target (although it had been robbed previously on May 11th, that was viewed as an anomalous situation).
-- The tellers were trained to comply with robber demands, to the extent possible.

The tellers quickly complied, but when the robbers wanted cash in the vault and were told by one of the tellers, Amber Rogers, that she did not have access, they shot her. They also shot the bank's President, Mark Poole, and a customer who was getting off the elevator. The 26-year old teller died from her wounds. The men are in stable condition and expected to recover.

These trigger-happy savages snuffed out the life of a bright and friendly young woman who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and irrevocably changed the lives of those they wounded.

It is impossible to make sense of a senseless crime like this. While we all breathed a sigh of relief when police and FBI quickly arrested three suspects and an alleged accomplice (due to tips received from the public), the damage has already been done.

One of the local television stations ran a poll on its Web site:



While the poll is not scientific, it indicates that 61% of 5,228 respondents would be inclined to use the drive-thru window (rather than coming into a branch or main office) because of the recent rash of bank robberies in the city. That's fine if a person just needs to cash a check or make a deposit, but what happens when a frightened person wants to open an account, access a safe deposit box, obtain a loan?

There are undoubtedly some lessons to be learned from this crime, but it's too soon, still too painful, to begin to see what they might be.