Heist

Even as a kid Luke Elliott Sommer showed a talent for leadership. And by the time he finished U.S. Army Ranger School his mind had become a precision weapon capable of planning strategic attacks on buildings in enemy territory. Then he came home.

By James Ross Gardner

Illustration: Justin Wood

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Surveillance footage from the robbery.

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MONDAY, AUGUST 7, 2006, 5:15 p.m. The end of a punishing hot afternoon on South Tacoma Way, a four-lane boulevard flanked by car dealerships and payday-loan shops. Inside Bank of America, a squat 1960s building with faux granite siding and floor-to-ceiling windows squeezed between the Budget Signs and Car Trek II used auto lot, teller Jessicah Stotts was about to hand four 20s to a customer when she heard a scream and looked up to see a masked figure leaping over the bandit barrier, the eight-foot glass wall separating the tellers from customers, and into the teller pit.

Stotts and the other tellers scrambled to the other end of the pit and tumbled into a heap. Across the lobby two more men, their faces also hidden behind balaclava masks, stood guard at the entrances, machine guns drawn, while a fourth, pistol in hand, made for the vault. “Get up,” the gunman in the pit ordered. The women froze. Stotts, near the top of the pile, a pair of teller’s legs across her waist, shot a glance at his eyes. The bluest she’d ever seen. Did she know him? Hadn’t he been in before?

He lifted a pistol and projected a tiny red bead onto each teller; the laser sight on his Glock forecasting the exact point a 9-millimeter bullet would enter their bodies. “I said, Get up.”

The most sophisticated bank robbery in recent Washington State history—one the FBI would later describe as executed with “military-style precision and planning”—was a heist weeks in the making. The blue-eyed leader had cased the place for days. And he and his coconspirators, most members of an elite military squad based at Fort Lewis, had rehearsed each of the 99 seconds they spent in the bank. They carried enough weaponry, according to prosecutors, to create “a bloodbath in the streets of Tacoma.” But if you take the ringleader’s word for it, the seeds of the crime were sewn in the blood-soaked sands of Iraq and Afghanistan.


FBI special agent Monte Shaide arrived at 5813 South Tacoma Way a little after 5:30. The parking lot was already crowded with Tacoma’s white Crown Victoria police cars. In his eight years with the FBI’s Pierce County Violent Crimes Task Force, Shaide had investigated nearly 400 bank robberies. Most were easy to solve. The majority of the roughly 50 bank jobs each year are quests for a quick fix—twitchy junkies in over their heads, passing scribbled demand notes to tellers, slinking out of the bank and to their dealer, then settling into a hotel room to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The police simply canvass area hotels and nab the perp.

Right away, Shaide knew this one was different. Four young men, maybe aged 19 to 21, two with rifles, two with pistols. “A takeover robbery,” Shaide thought. Then Shaide, who’d also spent eight years as a SWAT team operator, reviewed the security video. “These guys were definitely using a close-quarter battle tactic— CQB,” he explained later. “Two did a great job in their sector, which is their AOR—area of responsibility—as the other two went in,” one to the vault, the other to the teller pit. Who could’ve pulled off such a perfectly orchestrated crime? He marveled at one move in particular: The robber flying onto the counter, grabbing the top of the eight-foot bandit barrier with one hand, and vaulting himself over to the other side. “The most athletic move I’ve ever seen in a bank. Period.”


NEXT: The robbery’s mastermind alleges witnessing war crimes.

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Published: September 2009