Convicted robber sought in four bank heists in N.Va.

A serial bank robber has hit at least four Northern Virginia banks in the past three weeks, police say, and authorities are trying to determine whether their suspect has robbed even more banks across the region.

Police allege that Quenten T. Sims, 43, has made off with an undisclosed amount of cash in four robberies in Fairfax and Arlington counties from Oct. 10 to Oct. 26. In each instance, a man fitting Sims's description has quietly walked up to a bank teller, showed a note demanding money and walked away after getting it.

Each of the robberies occurred between 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., and police said the robber appeared to have worn similar clothes each time: a dark knit skullcap, a black wool coat and jeans. In the Oct. 10 Fairfax robbery at a Beacon Hill area TD Bank branch, the robber was described as wearing a dark warm-up suit.

Police have interviewed the tellers and have reviewed surveillance video, leading them to seek out Sims specifically and to release his photograph to aid their search.

Sims has a history of bank robberies in the Washington region, according to federal court records. He was convicted on two counts of bank robbery in a Virginia U.S. District Court in 1998 and was given a seven-year prison term and three years of supervised release after he pleaded guilty in the Alexandria federal courthouse. Simultaneous federal charges of bank robbery in the District were dropped in 1998 when Sims was found guilty.

Sims was released from federal custody June 14, 2006, according to prison records, but it appears he is still on supervised release. District Judge Claude M. Hilton ordered Sims to appear in court Oct. 16 to justify his continued release and issued a warrant for his arrest that day. It was six days after the Fairfax bank robbery and one day before a State Department Federal Credit Union branch was robbed in Arlington's Clarendon neighborhood.

Three days later, a man matching Sims's description robbed a Commerce Bank a few blocks away. The third robbery in Arlington, on Monday, was at a Wachovia Bank in the 1400 block of South Fern Street, near the Pentagon City mall.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.