Man Accused of Robbing Queens Bank in a Wheelchair

The man in the gray hooded sweatshirt rolled into a bank in Queens at midday on Monday, and handed the teller a note demanding cash.

“Give me all you have,” the note said, according to court papers. “I have a gun.”

The teller at the Santander Bank branch in Long Island City, Queens, complied, handing over $1,212, and then watched the man make his improbable getaway — in a wheelchair.

He pushed himself out of the bank and west on Broadway, his image captured on surveillance cameras in the bank and in stores along his escape route. After detectives disseminated his photo, the leads poured forth.

Police officials said on Friday that they had arrested Kelvin Dennison, 23, who provided the authorities with an address in Astoria, Queens, about two miles from the bank. He was a familiar figure in the neighborhood, the police said, a local panhandler with a brief arrest record for domestic episodes over the winter, including one on Valentine’s Day.

“Several Crime Stoppers tips came in identifying him by name and address,” a police official said. “Someone saw him on some sort of social media and gave his name.”

Mr. Dennison is not the first person in a wheelchair to be accused of theft. In 2013, Matias Moreno-Boza, of Perth Amboy, N.J., was believed to have been responsible for a string of stolen purses and wallets in Midtown Manhattan restaurants, bars and hotels. He pleaded guilty in 2014, appearing in court in his wheelchair.

There have also been other wheelchair bank robbers: In 2010, a terminally ill man in California was sentenced to 21 years in prison for robbing a bank in San Diego, armed with a BB gun.

Then there are times when those in wheelchairs turn the tables on their assailants: In 2006, an attempted robbery in Harlem ended when the intended victim, a woman in a wheelchair, shot the assailant with a licensed .357 handgun.

As for the most recent incident, it was not immediately clear if Mr. Dennison had a gun during the robbery. A break in the case came on Wednesday, the police said, after he arrived at a hospital for reasons that were not immediately clear. Someone recognized him and called 911 to summon patrol officers from the 114th Precinct.

They responded and arrested him, the police said.

Mr. Dennison was charged with third-degree robbery, a class D felony, and held on $15,000 cash bail after a court arraignment Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Queens district attorney’s office said on Friday.

Along the way, Mr. Dennison explained his disability was caused by a crime in which he was a victim: He had been shot.

“That is what he told us,” said Meris Campbell, the spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, who stressed that Mr. Dennison’s account could not be immediately verified. “I don’t know where the shooting was, whether it was in Queens or not, but that is what he said.”

Steven Sternberg, a lawyer for Mr. Dennison, did not return calls on Friday. A woman at a fourth-floor apartment on Astoria Boulevard where neighbors said Mr. Dennison lived declined to comment. “He’s not here right now,” said the woman, who did not open the door or identify herself.

Outside the apartment complex, a 79-year-old man who said he has known Mr. Dennison “since he was born,” said he recalled Mr. Dennison having been shot and paralyzed from the waist down, between seven and 10 years ago.

Mr. Dennison’s injuries made the circumstances of his arrest difficult to fathom, the man said.

“I thought it couldn’t be possible,” said the man, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter. “I mean, the guy is in a wheelchair.”

The man said Mr. Dennison was “a normal kid until he got shot” in what the man described as a random act of violence.

“The guys, they were just shooting over there,” he said, pointing in the direction of a courtyard outside the building complex, beyond a children’s playground.

Late Friday, on the eve of Independence Day, the bank that was robbed was nearly empty. One woman stood at the low-slung counter, without a ceiling-high Plexiglas barrier between her and the teller. An assistant manager declined to discuss what had occurred days earlier.

culled from nytimes