Daring armored truck heist in SR

<p>A gunman disguised as a gardener dropped a lawn trimmer and showed a handgun to rob an armored truck Wednesday at Santa Rosa's Montgomery Village Shopping Center.</p><p>He escaped "looking like Santa Claus with a bag bursting at the seams, bigger than he could carry," said a maintenance worker who recovered a bag containing $300,000 from the 10:23 a.m. robbery.</p><p>Police didn't disclose how much money was taken from the Brink's truck, which was parked outside the Bank of America branch at Sonoma Avenue and Hahman Drive.</p><p>Several people said they saw the man before the robbery. He was wearing blue jeans, a maroon windbreaker and a gardening dust mask.</p><p>"He was walking through the mall carrying a weed whacker," said the maintenance worker, who asked not to be identified after his encounter with the gunman. "He looked like a gardener but I knew he was not one of ours."</p><p>Morgan Wilson of Guerneville, who was with a crew replacing a sewer line on Hahman Drive, said the man passed by before the robbery, carrying a lawn trimmer.</p><p>"This is a nice neighborhood," he said. "Everybody is real friendly. It's crazy that this stuff can happen here."</p><p>Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Lisa Banayat said the gunman was a white man in his 20s or 30s and stood about 5-foot-10.</p><p>The maintenance worker said he saw him a second time, "barreling around the corner looking like Santa Claus, with a big bag bursting at the seams."</p><p>"He was really struggling with the weight of the bag," he said. "He stopped, looked at me, and threw something out. I went over to look and saw it was a bag of money."</p><p>David Codding, the shopping center owner, said the maintenance worker brought the recovered cash, totaling $300,000, to the office, and the pair called the bank and police.</p><p>Codding said there are six banks and savings and loans at Montgomery Village. None, he said, was the target of an armored truck robbery before Wednesday.</p><p>Bank of America, which is flanked by a post office, is in a section of the shopping center that often is busy with delivery trucks, said Lauren Lough, a part-time employee at Village Art Supply.</p><p>That they could be the target of a robbery shocked her.</p><p>"It never occurred to me that something like that could happen," she said. "You think armored trucks are safe."</p><p>A manager at the Bank of America branch declined to comment and couldn't say if the truck was affiliated with the bank.</p><p>Word of the heist traveled quickly through the shopping center, where most stores had opened minutes earlier.</p><p>Lough said she had walked across the parking lot where the armored truck was parked minutes before a customer came in and described the scene outside.</p><p>"The customer said there were cop cars all over," Lough said. "I thought, 'I was just there!' "</p><p>Another armored car robbery occurred in September at the Exchange Bank on Stony Point Road.</p><p>In that incident a gunman walked from the parking lot toward the bank as if he were a customer, pulled a gun and told the Loomis courier to freeze, police said at the time.</p><p>The armed Loomis employee was at a door at the back of the 26,000-pound truck when the robber grabbed a money bag from a cart used to carry money into the bank.</p><p>The description of the suspect was "vaguely similar" and investigators were "looking into the possibility" that the robberies could be related, Banayat said Wednesday.</p><p>But both descriptions are vague and making a match off of what is available wasn't immediately possible, she said.</p><p>Staff Writer Randi Rossmann contributed to this report. You can reach Staff Writer Laura Norton at 521-5220 or laura.norton@pressdemocrat.</p><p>com</p>