Scammer
Banned
Mark Pollard went into an Amherst, N.S., bank to install a photocopier and came out with a bank robber.
Pollard stopped by the TD Canada Trust on Tuesday morning to install the new photocopier. He was on his way out with the old machine when a teller stopped him and alerted him to the robbery.
"She said, 'We're going into lockdown.' I said lockdown? And she said, 'We're being robbed.'"
Pollard looked around the room. With a snowstorm blowing outside, few people were in the bank, and it didn't take him long to zero in on the man wearing a ski mask.
A teller nodded in acknowledgement.
Moments later, Pollard confronted the masked man as he walked toward the door.
"I said, 'You have until the door to change your mind.' He didn't change his mind so I followed him out, grabbed him and threw him to the ground."
Pollard, who is six foot three inches tall and 240 pounds, held the smaller man until police arrived.
"After I came down on top of him, he really wasn't moving anywhere."
Pollard looked through the window and saw one of the tellers crying. Another clerk mouthed that the man said he had a bomb.
"I'm like, 'I wish I would've known that before,'" Pollard said Wednesday with a laugh. "I'm one of those people who do now and think later, I guess."
Amherst police said the man left the bank with a bag of money. No weapon was mentioned in their news release on the incident.
Pollard said he pinned the man down in the snow so wasn't able to see anything he might have been carrying.
"The officers all came up and shook my hand and said, 'Great job, but we don't recommend you do that.' And that's what my wife said too."
Pollard figures he would do the same thing today, but not if there were five robbers with machine guns.
A 57-year-old man faces charges in connection with the robbery.
