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U.S. Department of Justice PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For Information, Tuesday, September 11, 2007
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Washington, D.C. - A 41-year-old Lanham, Maryland man, Kevin Honesty, pleaded guilty today to the July 19, 2002 armed takeover and robbery of the SunTrust Bank, located at 5601 Third Street, NE, in Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor announced.
Honesty, whose last known address was on Heston Terrace, in Lanham, Maryland, pleaded guilty to armed bank robbery and a weapons offense, before U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman. The armed bank robbery charge carries a possible sentence of 25 years of imprisonment; the weapons offense has a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years and a maximum sentence of 15 years. Honesty, who is already serving a federal sentence of 25 years of imprisonment for armed bank robbery in Maryland, will be sentenced on this new charge on September 26, 2007.
According to the government’s evidence for the SunTrust bank robbery, on the afternoon of Friday, July 19, 2002, two men wearing painted plastic masks burst into the SunTrust Bank pointing weapons. The taller of the two men, who was never identified, pulled a pistol-grip shotgun from a long, striped box; the other man, Honesty, brandished a small, silver handgun. The bank tellers and customers were held on the floor of the bank lobby by the suspect wielding the shotgun, while Honesty brandished his gun and ordered other employees to give him cash. He and the other suspect fled with $11,965.
None of the tellers or customers was able to identify the bank robbers, but one month later, in August of 2002, after the robbery of another bank in Maryland (at which a hat was recovered with Honesty’s DNA in the sweatband) and of an armored truck in Maryland (near which was recovered a painted plastic mask with Honesty’s fingerprints), law enforcement officers obtained a search warrant for Honesty’s Heston Terrace residence, where they recovered many items, including the pistol-grip shotgun, the long striped box, and the silver handgun used in the SunTrust Bank robbery in Washington, D.C. Honesty has been in custody since that time, and pleaded guilty to one of the Maryland robberies, in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Maryland, in October of 2006.
In announcing today’s guilty plea, U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor praised the work of FBI Special Agents Ndubisi Nwachuku, Thomas Warter and Michelle Miller, as well as Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara E. Kittay, who investigated and prosecuted the case in the District of Columbia.