Captives Scared, Impatient for Police to Act

PLACENTIA — One by one, and then in small groups, they emerged from the Bank of America in the Placentia Town Center, to the cheers of family, friends and onlookers.

A child hostage waved his clenched fists as he walked from the bank. Police officers flanked each hostage, as the crowd yelled, “Happy New Year!”

There were 29--bank employees and customers, in work clothes, shorts, jeans and sweaters. And for six hours, they had been held hostage inside the bank, which at least one gunman--who later killed himself when confronted by police--had tried to hold up shortly after 4 p.m. He had left an attache case, and told the hostages it would explode if they moved.

Karen Miner, 24, of Fullerton, whose father Allan was a hostage, had been waiting anxiously for hours outside. Soon after his release, she said, “I’m just thrilled he’s OK. I knew he would be. I would have been just devastated if anything had happened.”

There were brief reports of what had gone on inside.

One of the hostages told reporters: “It’s pretty scary when someone’s got a gun to your gut.”

A teller, Paige Sturgeon, said “seven hours with 30 people in one room . . . it was kind of crazy. I was playing hangman and tic tac toe til I died.”

One young hostage, a new accounts customer representative, said that when the robber first took over the bank, one irate customer outside banged and kicked the door yelling, “I’m a VIP, I have to get in!” Finally, it so annoyed the robber that he opened the door, grabbed the irate customer, and threw him in a closet by himself for an hour.

During the next six hours, Sturgeon said, the hostages became impatient with the police. They wanted to be rescued, thinking they could flee if authorities broke a window.

One hostage, a customer, became so impatient he actually left the room and walked right by the attache case, said Sturgeon. He didn’t trigger the attache, but he frightened the other hostages.

“Everybody was getting very impatient with the police,” Sturgeon said. “We wanted to break the windows and get out. We said to them, ‘Let’s go!’ ”

The hostages were communicating with authorities by telephone but were frustrated because they were unable to use the restrooms, Sturgeon said.

When the original suspect--the man who later killed himself--first entered the bank, Sturgeon said, he was wearing a suit. He told the bank manager he was going to rob the bank and had a bomb in an attache case.

He flashed a gun and said the attache case “was motion sensitive,” recalled Sturgeon. The burgundy attache case was placed right outside the door of the room into which all the employees had been herded at the robber’s instructions, he said.

Almost immediately, the robber left.

For hours, the hostages milled about aimlessly inside, awaiting word that they would be released.

“We started to loosen up after a few hours,” one hostage said.

They spoke in whispers. “It was one of the customer’s birthday so we sang happy birthday,” she said.

One small group, including the young boy, pressed their noses to a glass window with a handwritten sign that read, “We’re okay.”

But outside, the police situation was tense. They had reason to believe that explosives could be planted inside. And even possibly one gunmen left among them. The suspect who fled the scene immediately after the aborted robbery had told police before he died that there were explosives left inside the bank.

At a command center set up at a McDonald’s nearby, the police kept the lights off, but had floodlights from there trained on the bank.

At 8:15 p.m., SWAT team members moved excitedly toward the bank with guns drawn. But 15 minutes later, they retreated. Then again in 15 minutes, they moved to the bank again, and again backed off.

It was unclear to the crowd outside the bank whether a second suspect was inside. But one man, described as “uncooperative,” emerged from the bank alone, bare-chested, his hands in the air, after a discussion on the telephone with police negotiators Dennis Grim and Rick Miller. Although most reports later were that he was not a suspect, the crowd outside didn’t know that. One man yelled out, “Shoot him!” The FBI interrogated him intensely at a nearby McDonald’s restaurant, set up as a command center.

But still the hostages remained. Finally, half an hour after the bare-chested man had been interviewed, police SWAT team members and bomb squad experts moved tentatively toward the front of the building. With guns drawn, SWAT members could be seen through the large windows searching every inch for any potential danger. Bomb squad members in protective gear searched too, but found nothing.

The police had been telling the news media during the crisis that when the hostages emerged, each would be treated as a suspect, for fear that a suspect among them was pretending to be a hostage. But those fears eventually subsided.

There was some tomfoolery outside while the hostages waited to be released. About 9:15 p.m., when tensions outside were high, someone threw some firecrackers toward the bank, jarring many of the onlookers and scaring family members. One pizza company sold pizzas to the crowd for $5 each.

When the hostages finally were released, they were whisked away in waiting police cars to a nearby triage center for debriefing and any needed medical treatment or counseling.

“In an emergency like this, you have to be prepared for any kind of emotional reaction a hostage might have,” said Orange County Fire Department Capt. Dan Young.

One witness who returned to the scene was Audrey Ramos of Yorba Linda. She told reporters that shortly after 4 p.m., when she was driving with a friend on Yorba Linda Boulevard, she saw the bank robber walking toward her with a gun to his side. When she moved her car forward, he focused on the blue station wagon behind her, jerked its driver from the car, and drove off with two hostages.

“He started out real calm, but I think he kind of saw there were cops and he got kind of panicky,” she said.

Margaret Hollander, mother of Teresa Ahmadi, 29, who has been with the bank for 10 years, said: “It is a happy new year, all our prayers are answered, I am glad everyone is safe. I feel sorry for the robbers; you have to have compassion for these people.”

Times staff writers Bob Elston, Eric Young and Eric Lichtblau contributed to this story.