Police last week collared a suspect in the July robbery of a Fairfax County BB&T, only to see another bank struck on Thursday — the 27th in an unusually busy year for bank robberies in the county.
The number of Fairfax bank robberies since January already exceeds the number committed over each of the most recent years. If the trend continues, 2006 could be on track to match 1997, when the county saw 45 such crimes. Many of this year’s robberies are tied in with the same suspect, police say.
Of the 27 this year, six have been closed with arrests.
“I’m confident we’ll close substantially more of them,” Bob Callahan, commander of the criminal investigations bureau, said Friday. “It does appear to us that there is a relationship between several of the series [of crimes]. … The arrest of one or two people will end up closing quite a few of them.”
Most recently, police say a BB&T branch on Commerce Street in Springfield was robbed by a an unidentified man, who employed the common tactic of using a note to demand cash, and fled the bank with an undisclosed amount of money. No one was injured.
An Upper Marlboro man was arrested with the help of U.S. marshals at his home on Aug. 1. Calvin L. Bowman, 38, had been identified as one of two suspects who allegedly robbed a Vienna-area BB&T on July 28.
Fairfax County employs about 1,350 police officers, fewer than half as many working in the District, which has less than half of the county’s population. Fairfax Coalition of Police President Marshall Thielen said the force doesn’t have the staffing to adequately cover all the county’s banks.
“If our staffing was at the level that we need it to be, we would be able to be more proactive in these types of cases,” Thielen said.
