There goes a dollar...
Posted on 12/04/2007 8:54:55 PM PST by OCC
CINCINNATI (Map, News) - Two college students say the high cost of tuition led them to rob a bank.
The men pleaded guilty to two charges of aggravated robbery and six charges of kidnapping. They face 20 years in prison when sentenced Dec. 27.
Andrew Butler, 20, a student at the University of Toledo, told Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Steve Martin on Monday that tuition increases outpaced his scholarships and financial aid.
Christopher Avery, 22, a student at the University of Cincinnati, said he couldn't pay for summer classes after an internship at a grocery store fell through.
"I was strapped for cash," Avery said. "I thought I had nothing to lose."
Armed with guns and wearing masks, Butler and Avery made off with $130,000 from a crowded Valley Central Savings Bank in suburban Reading on July 17, said Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Brian Goodyear.
An attempt to rob a check-cashing business a day earlier was thwarted when the students couldn't get through the business' security system despite firing four shots at the bullet-resistant glass, Goodyear said.
The men were caught after trying to switch cars. A witness who thought they were acting suspiciously called police.
Both were being held in a county jail without bond.
Bull
I suppose a summer job was totally out of the question.
First tuition, now bail money. Whatcha gonna do?
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Both perps “a student”; boy the media really narrowed that down. Freshmen, sophomores, seniors? What are their declared majors? Probably not business administration if one had to make an educated guess, but these days who knows?
Stooopid, Stooopid! I guess they’re lucky no one died, I doubt they ever thought of that.
Essentially, they robbed a bank because that’s where the money was.
and these two geniuses decide to rob people to continue their college education.
Well Bunky, your going to learn prison economics and health care for the next several years. Don’t forget to write.
More detail:
Two young black men – who told a judge they robbed a Reading bank because they needed college tuition – had other options but didn’t use them, said the mother of one man and minority advocates.
Andrew Butler, 20, of Milford, and Christopher Avery, 22, of College Hill, were convicted Monday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court on charges of aggravated robbery and kidnapping for robbing Valley Central Savings bank July 17, and a robbery at Ohio Check Cashiers in Mount Auburn the previous day.
Prosecutors agreed to a 20-year prison term, far less than the 108 years behind bars the men faced.
At sentencing Dec. 27, Judge Steve Martin has discretion to impose lengthier sentences.
The case had people buzzing today and a lot of them asked the question: “Why?”
The men said in court they felt they had no other choice: It was steal the money or drop out of school.
Butler was a University of Toledo sophomore last year. Avery was University of Cincinnati freshman.
Franki Butler-Kidd, Andrew Butler’s mother, has never talked to her son about the case. He’s been behind bars – where conversations are monitored by authorities – since the holdups.
She talked about the case today and said the robber described in court is not the same Andrew Butler she raised. “I know he felt overwhelmed,” she said. “There was a lot of pressure.”
She added she is not making excuses for her son. “I’m just saying that’s what happened,” she said.
Butler did not have a criminal record.
Butler-Kidd said her son baked cookies with her, helped the elderly at church and traveled to New Orleans during a spring break to help with the Hurricane Katrina rebuilding effort.
Butler attended Taft Information Technical High School and was one of two black students to get a $20,000 scholarship from Cincinnati Bell to be awarded over four years.
Butler went to the University of Toledo where he started as a business major and switched to theater, his passion after acting and modeling as a child.
“Tuition was high even with the scholarship,” Franki Butler-Kidd said. And, there were living expenses too.
She couldn’t afford to help because she had to pay off her own student loans after recently graduating from college herself.
She took out a $2,500 loan for him. “I felt like he could have been the king, the president, anything he wanted,” she said. “But he threw all those opportunities away.
“This is not who I raised,” she said.
Ron Felder, president of the Queen City Foundation, an organization that recruits and steers minority students toward secondary education opportunities, and Christopher Smitherman, president of the Cincinnati chapter of NAACP, said the men should have asked for help.
Crime is the easy way out, they said.
“I just don’t understand that type of desperation,” Felder said. “I don’t understand not communicating it to somebody.”
The colleges the men attended have financial aid offices, Felder pointed out. He wondered if the pair just wanted the easy way out.
“We’re raising a generation of kids who want to be compensated for no reason at all,” Felder said. “Nobody said it was easy, people just said it was accessible.”
Smitherman said what the men did was wrong, although he understands frustration at the price of a college education.
“Part of this is that young people – all young people – have to make better decisions,” Smitherman said.
“They could have reached out to their parents, or church or the NAACP, other people in the community,” Smitherman said. “There is help out there.
“I’m not saying it’s easy, but life isn’t easy,” he added.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters released graphic photos from the Valley Central robbery that show the pair sticking guns in tellers’ faces and jumping over the counter, intimidation that helped them steal $130,000 from the bank.
Deters doubts the tuition was the real motivation.
“I don’t care if they can split the atom. I don’t care if they are Harvard graduates. I don’t care,” Deters said. “Whatever happened to working? I just think that’s a convenient excuse.”
At least they quoted this guy:
“We’re raising a generation of kids who want to be compensated for no reason at all,” Felder said. “Nobody said it was easy, people just said it was accessible.”
There goes a dollar...
And they enjoyed every second of it.
These two just like robbing banks.
Now they will find out exactly what they had to lose.
maybe they should have studied criminal justice
They should have invested in pork bellies!
Hey! Math 55 ain’t cheap.
10-20 is nothing, you can do it standing on your head.
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