It seems not all bankers are evil pricks like Jamie Dimon. A small town bank in Idaho has a sense of humor.
A bandit made off with $26,000 of Idaho First’s money following a shootout with cops. A week later, the bank ran one of the funnier ads you’ll see from a financial institution.
January 10 was typically cold in McCall, Idaho, a small resort town with nary 3,000 residents. With temperatures lingering just below freezing, Nathan Davenport decided to hit the ATM.
Literally. With his truck.
Sometime around 9 o’clock, Davenport pulled up to the ATM outside Idaho First Bank. Wearing dark clothes and a mask, he proceeded to cut the bolts off the ATM’s door, then attached a chain to it and ripped the door free with his truck (a stolen truck, of course). Apparently this wasn’t Davenport’s first time hijacking an ATM. The caper took less than seven minutes, and Davenport split with cash totaling $26,120.
Across the street, Alex Hamilton and his girlfriend, Sara Chu, were leaving the grocery store across the way when they spotted Davenport yanking the door off the ATM. They called police, who caught up with Davenport minutes later not far from the scene of the crime.
The chase didn’t last long. During the getaway, Davenport stopped his truck, got out and fired at officers, disabling the two squad cars in pursuit.
No one was hurt in the incident, and police eventually caught up with Davenport a couple days later. Turns out Davenport has knocked off at least 20 ATMs in similar heists over the last 16 months according to police, snatching over a half million dollars along the way.
The week following Davenport’s arrest, Idaho First Bank took out the following advertisement in their local paper, the McCall Star-News:
I’d put my money in that bank.
