Bank robber asked for taxi: witness
Glenfield woman says police swooped in after stranger stopped at her house
One moment Tui Walters was sitting down for lunch — the next, armed police were telling her to put her hands in the air and asking if she was hiding a fugitive.
She wasn’t. She’d actually told the alleged bank robber to “f*** off” moments before.
Walters lives on Bentley Ave, near Glenfield Rd, where an ANZ branch was the scene of a bank robbery yesterday afternoon.
A man carrying a pistol entered the bank about 1.10pm before he and a woman left with a small sum of money, according to police.
Walters had no idea what had happened at the bank 400 metres away when she noticed a “sweaty” man looking in her kitchen window.
“He said ‘ can you call me a cab please?’ . . . I just thought, ‘ well, I’m doing a person a favour’. I didn’t know about the bank robbery.”
She had just called a taxi for the man when “all of a sudden I had police cars everywhere”.
The man tried to enter Walters’ back door, she told the Herald. “I told him to f*** off.” He ran off and police rushed up. Minutes earlier, Terry Murphy was outside the bank when he saw a “dodgy” hoodie-clad man walk in.
Poking his head inside after the man left, he was spotted by a staff member, he told NZ Herald Focus.
“Just being nosy I had a look and the lady said, ‘We’ve just been robbed, can you see what car he’s gone into?’”
A police manhunt, which originally included the lockdown of Bayview School yesterday afternoon, continued last night.
The wanted man is thought to be aged in his mid 20s and is described as a Maori or Pacific Islander. He was wearing sunglasses and a white hoodie with the hood up, police said.
Detective Sergeant Ross Clapp of Waitemata said police were speaking to several witnesses.
The bank’s procedures meant there was not much cash in the tills, and no one had been injured, he said.
Murphy was able to help police in the initial stages, after he followed the alleged robber down an alley.
When police arrived, Murphy rode with them and they found the man had gone to the house of a stranger.
“He asked the lady at the house to call for a cab. Just a random person. She had no idea what’s going on.”
The police Eagle helicopter and members of the dog unit were among those hunting for the man last night.
Beach Haven woman Ashleah Copeland was driving east on Manuka Rd, 2km from the bank, just before 2pm when a black car being followed by police came “flying past” in the opposite direction. “He was going at least 120km/h. “The next thing there was just cop car after cop car . . . eight all together.”