12-Year Term for 'Cell Phone Bandit'

Candice Martinez, using a cell phone during a robbery, apologized in court to the bank tellers: "I'm sorry you're traumatized by this." (Fairfax County Police Department)

The bank teller stood nervously at the courtroom podium in Alexandria yesterday and shot a quick glance at the woman sitting six feet to her right:

The woman who had handed her a note in October saying, "Give me money from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd drawers or we will shoot you or a person close to you."

The woman who never stopped talking on her cell phone while she was robbing the bank.

Seated at the defense table in U.S. District Court, Candice R. Martinez, now 20, stared straight ahead as the teller described her trauma. "I will never forget her face when I gave her that money," said Jessica Dickerson, 20, sobbing. "Never." Dickerson said she needed counseling to continue working at the bank, adding, "I have trouble going to sleep at night, having flashbacks of that day," Oct. 21, when her Manassas bank branch was robbed by the "cell phone bandit."

Martinez apologized to Dickerson and all the tellers she victimized during the four holdups she committed last fall in Northern Virginia while chatting with her boyfriend, who was waiting outside.

"I wasn't thinking of you," Martinez said, also crying. "I wasn't thinking. I wish I could change it. I'm sorry you're traumatized by this. I'm sorry."

U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee sentenced Martinez to 12 years in prison for conspiracy to rob banks and using a gun in a felony. It was the same term he imposed last week on Martinez's boyfriend and co-conspirator, Dave C. Williams, 19. Both pleaded guilty in December.

"You said he was your knight in shining armor," Lee said to Martinez, referring to her description of Williams in an interview with The Washington Post. "In this case, Dave and Candice go to prison. It's not a fairy tale."

Lee said he was amazed to learn from a court report that before the robberies began in October, Martinez had phoned an aunt who worked at a bank in New Mexico and asked her, "hypothetically," about the ease of robbing banks.

The judge quoted the aunt as telling Martinez, "Robbing a bank is all fun and games, until you get caught after about a month."

It was a prescient comment by the aunt. The holdups began Oct. 12 at a Wachovia branch in Vienna where Williams formerly worked. Lee said the pair had studied Williams's employee manual to determine the best way to commit the robbery.

A month later, on Nov. 12, authorities searched the couple's apartment in Chantilly, finding new electronics, designer clothes and $3,500 in cash, still wrapped in Wachovia paper bands. Williams and Martinez were arrested days later.