The Frontier Bank in the Ballard Market parking lot was robbed just after 5 p.m. Monday. My Ballard reader John sent us a tip when he noticed the bank was closed early with police cruisers outside. We arrived a few minutes later to see officers getting statements from employees inside.
Louie has been posting updates from the police scanner in the forum, including a description of the suspect: white male, 40-50 years old, 160 pounds, 5′ 8″, tan jacket, blue jeans, brown baseball cap and tape around his fingers. He left in an unknown vehicle eastbound on 57th. We briefly spoke to a bank employee who told us there were no injuries. (Thanks John and Louie!)
Frontier Bank robbed just before closing
Bank robberies, bums, stabbings, roving gangs of vagrants taking over our parks.
I could have moved to the CD and had all this for half the mortgage.
Not to mention arson and murder.. What is the deal North Seattle?
The cops should check out the group of transients (several of whom fit the robber's description) that hang out across the street by the Burger King and the old Sunset Bowl parking lot. There were a number of them huddled together across from the bank's drive-thru structure around 4:30pm today. I didn't get a good enough look or I'd call in a tip.
This bank is right across the street from me! Wish I'd been home to give a blow by blow report! Thanks for manning the scanner, Louie!
Talk about a “personal stimulus plan”. Yeesh. Why don't all banks simply have that thick glass? Does all this come under Websters definition of “gentrification”? Imagine if more here had protection ( not Trojans) instead of a phone to call 911? All this in Bizerkley North! All the no-gun-nuts can merely put a sign in their front yard exclaiming : this house has NO guns whatsoever in it. Talk about feelin really good. Recitivism.
“Imagine if more here had protection “
yeah, then we'd be hearing about a shooting every night instead of just every few months. that's just what we DON'T need is some morons waving their guns around trying to protect the place.
We're tired of Lakewood getting all the air time on the news!
Yasure… but could you get a kringle and coffee at the same time?!
this is certainly not good news, especially considering all the other nasty stuff that's been going on in ballard lately.
but i wonder, has the crime rate actually gone up in Ballard in the last 5-10 years? when adjusted to reflect the population increase, has per-capita crime gone up?
or are we just more aware of it now because of the web and sites like myballard?
i'm not bashing myballard at all, it's clearly important and helpful to the local community to be made aware, in near real-time (thanks, Silver!), of these things. myballard is nothing like the sensationalist mainstream media which intentionally hype stories. but is it possible that they have a similar, albeit unintentional, effect on the local perception of crime?
i obviously can't make a call either way without any real data, but i do wonder….?
i've worked as a bank teller and i can assure you that i would never have risked my own life, nor wanted to be in a position to take another person's life, just to protect somebody else's money.
that's why banks have insurance.
Without digging up the stats, crime was fairly level for a while and then there was a spike in the last 6-12 months.
The other issue is that the petty crime rate is up and fewer people are even bothering to report a lot of the nuisance crimes.
If you ever get to talk to people who do bank security on the corporate level they'll tell you they lose 10 to 1000 times as much through internet bank robberies than they do from the guy sticking up a branch office. The other side of that is that they rarely catch the internet crooks but they eventually catch the repeat bank robbers.
Somewhere in Kreblakistan a very wealthy computer programmer is laughing at this dude with the dye pack.
interesting, that's certainly how things seem. thanks.
do you know if the recent trend upward is unique to ballard?
if the trend is national, then it's clearly because obama got elected. ;-)
No, but I could get Ezell’s. It’s all good.
Don't make me pull real stats! The city sites with that stuff can get real deep and ugly.
I think it was broken down by sector, and so it was Ballard/sunset hill/greenwood/fremont that saw the uptick. Not sure what the last couple months will show.
Anyway, the stats are fun for internet postings, but the reality is that way too many car windows are being smashed and way too many stickups are happening. On the bright side the police have actually been doing a decent job of catching people despite their “policing from 10,000 ft altitude”.
internet bank robberies? is that what you call phishing?
how web 2.0 of you.
go twitter something.
A literary device to equate the hacking of a funds transfer system with an armed robbery. I'm sorry if I confused you.