KeyBank robbed, reward offered

WASILLA — Police and the FBI are seeking information about a bank robbery on Lucille Street Wednesday.

According to a press release from Mat-Su Crime Stoppers, the robbery was reported to the Wasilla Police Department at 4:46 p.m. at the KeyBank branch on Lucille Street near Parks Highway.

“The suspect wielded a boxcutter and fled on foot with an undisclosed amount of money,” according to the press release.

The suspect is a white male, 5-foot, 7-inches and was wearing a black Carhartt jacket and pants. He had a hood over his head and wore “what appeared to be a cut-out ski mask.”

Wasilla Police Chief Gene Belden was not available for comment Friday.

Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 745-3333 or submit a tip online at matsu-crimestoppers.org. Tips can earn up to $1,000 and tipsters can remain anonymous.

The Anchorage office of the FBI has gotten involved, according to media reports.

That would be standard procedure for bank robbery cases, according to the FBI’s website. The bureau has been in the business of investigated bank robberies since the 1930s and John Dillinger.

“In 1934, it became a federal crime to rob any national bank or state member bank of the Federal Reserve. The law soon expanded to include bank burglary, larceny, and similar crimes, with jurisdiction delegated to the FBI,” the website states.

Robbery as a crime is generally charged whenever someone uses force or the threat of force to take someone else’s property. Robberies between individuals are fairly uncommon in the Valley. Robberies of commercial businesses or banks are still less common, not only in the Valley but in Alaska as a whole. The last local business robbed, according to Frontiersman archives, was a pawn shop in Big Lake robbed at gunpoint in August 2011.

In 2011, the last year for which the FBI put out statistics, the nation saw 5,014 bank robberies. Only 12 of those were in Alaska.

Valley residents seem more predisposed to leave the Valley to commit robberies in Anchorage. In June 2011, a Palmer man, Shaun Vehlewald, was charged with a 2009 robbery of about $1,400 of an Anchorage Credit Union 1 branch.

A year later he pleaded guilty to bank robbery and sentenced to 35 months in prison. He was eventually also charged with robbery of $1,500 from a First National Bank branch. He made a quick confession and prosecutors sought a lenient sentence because he’d accepted responsibility and gotten his heroin addiction under control.

In 2012, a 62-year-old Wasilla woman was alleged to have tried to rob an Eagle River Wells Fargo branch. The FBI got involved then, too, but the woman was never charged with anything, according to state and federal court records. Her son told the Frontiersman at the time that his mother struggled with mental problems and with 15 years of heavy painkiller use stemming from a severe back injury.