Law enforcement linked a 38-year-old Port Orchard man to a robbery at the Bank of America location on Riddell Road in East Bremerton on Wednesday using a grocery store receipt and social media photos, according to court documents.
During the robbery at about 1 p.m. on Wednesday, the man walked into the bank branch and demanded a teller put money on the counter and “stated something to the effect of, ‘do it and no one will get hurt,’” a Kitsap County sheriff’s detective wrote in a report about the incident. The teller handed the man about $1,000, and he fled.
After the incident, clothes that the man was seen wearing in surveillance photos and a receipt from the Callow Avenue Safeway from earlier that morning were found a short distance from the bank. Law enforcement obtained more photos of the man from Safeway and from a Shell gas station on Wheaton Way a short distance from the bank around the time of the robbery.
The sheriff’s office released suspect photos on social media, and several people reached out and identified the man, according to court documents.
On Thursday, “arrangements were made” to meet the man, and he was arrested. Prosecutors charged the man with a count of first-degree robbery in Kitsap County Superior Court on Friday.
The man’s girlfriend told law enforcement that he contacted her on Wednesday afternoon asking if she wanted to meet and get her vehicle out of impound about 30 minutes after the robbery, the detective wrote. The two met in Bremerton, and he had $900 in cash to contribute to the impound fees, with the explanation that he had won the money at a casino.