Bank Teller Testifies In Dearl Lawton Armed Bank Robbery Case

  • Monday, February 1, 2016
  • Claire Henley Miller

In an instance of a bank robbery, a bank teller was trained to obey the robber’s orders. 

A teller followed this rule on Jan. 31, 2014 as a masked man held her at gunpoint at First Volunteer Bank in Hixson. 

During today’s trial before Federal Court Judge Curtis Collier, the teller testified in the case of 58-year-old Dearl Dean Lawton – the man charged as the robber who put a gun to her head.

Agents arrested Lawton in May 2015 after matching his DNA to a hooded sweatshirt they found in a nearby dumpster after the holdup. According to Matt Hennessey, an officer on the FBI Task Force, other articles of clothing that were ditched in the dumpster further revealed Lawton as the suspect. 

With a jury as her audience, the teller told in detail about the day of the robbery.

It was around 5:05 p.m. on a Friday, she said, when a man walked in the front door wearing a dark hoodie, gloves, sunglasses, and a mask that covered most of his face. 

She said the man was a little over six feet tall and muscular. She saw he held a gun and a khaki-colored bag with a zipper. A few seconds after he walked in, she realized he planned to rob the bank. 

The robber demanded every employee to line up behind the teller line behind the bank teller. “Give me the money,” he reportedly said, handing her his bag. 

In this situation, the teller had been trained to do as the robber said, unless he ordered her to leave the building with him. 

She said she calmly placed the money from her drawer into the bag. She said the robber told her to hurry. She obeyed. She said she went to touch the dye pack – a stack of fake bills that explode with dye when they travel a certain distance from the bank – when the man said, “Don’t give me the dye pack. I know what it looks like.” 

The teller testified to prosecutor Michael Porter that the defendant stood within arm’s length of her. She said the little bit of skin his mask did not cover was white. She said she is familiar with guns and believed the revolver he pointed in her face to be real. 

The prosecutor played the surveillance video from the robbery during the teller's testimony. The video captured the man with his bag in one hand and gun in the other. 

She said once she filled the bag with money she handed it back to the defendant. Before he left he ordered another man in the bank to give him his deposit bag, which reportedly had nothing in it. 

An agent at the trial opened an evidence bag and pulled out a dark sweatshirt. The teller looked at it for several seconds then identified it as the same hoodie the robber wore. 

On cross-examination, Lawton’s attorney Mitch Carter noted the teller hesitated when she identified the hoodie. He then confirmed the teller never handled the gun the robber pointed at her, and that the gun never fired, meaning she only speculated the gun was real.  

He said the people in the bank during the holdup should have the best knowledge of what the robber looked like. Because the man wore a mask, the teller said she could not see any facial features. But she was sure he was around 6’1” because of the height marker at the entrance of the bank. And she noted this in the suspect description sheet she filled within minutes after the robber left.

On the sheet it says, “If you’re unsure of an answer, don’t guess. Leave it blank.”

Mr. Carter pointed out that on this sheet the teller described the defendant as 30 to 35 years old. The attorney brought this up because Lawton is in his late 50s. 

“He didn’t walk in a manner that made him appear to be very old,” she said. 

At the same time, because sunglasses shaded his eyes, she said she could not tell if he had 
laughing lines. “He could be younger or older.”

The trial is set to continue Tuesday.

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