Posted on 08/13/2003 5:45:14 PM PDT by mhking
ABILENE, Texas -- A 91-year-old Texas man - once the oldest inmate in Florida - is back in jail again, accused of robbing his third bank in five years.
J.L. Hunter "Red" Rountree, of Goldthwaite, walked into a branch of First American Bank in Abilene about 10 a.m. Tuesday, demanded money from a teller and passed over a large envelope with "ROBBERY" written on it.
He left in a car parked near the bank, but a witness got the license plate, which police tracked to an address in Goldthwaite, 110 miles southeast of Abilene. About a half-hour later, Rountree was pulled over by officers with the Department of Public Safety and the Taylor County Sheriff's Department as he drove through Lawn, 16 miles south of Abilene on U.S. 84 on the way back to Goldthwaite.
Rountree was jailed on a charge of bank robbery. Bond was set at $150,000.
On Dec. 9, 1998, one week before his 87th birthday, Rountree was arrested in Biloxi, Miss., minutes after he robbed a bank. He was eventually given three years probation, fined $260 and told to leave Mississippi.
Less than a year later, in October 1999, he was arrested outside a NationsBank in Pensacola, Fla., after giving a teller a note that said "ROBBERY" written in red ink and telling her, "Give me the $100s." He was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to three years in prison, becoming the oldest inmate in the Florida prison system.
Sgt. Mike Perry of the Abilene Police Department said about $2,000 was taken in Tuesday's robbery, all of which was on Rountree when he was arrested.
"I don't ever recall us arresting a person this old, nor do I recall hearing of a person this old being arrested for a crime, much less bank robbery," Perry said.
"There's just not anything I want to say about it," Bobby Rountree, his great-nephew and Goldthwaite's city manager, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "He's a great-uncle with no family, and it's a bad deal. He's just been here about a year."
Betty Rountree of Goldthwaite, whose husband is Red Rountree's nephew, told the Orlando Sentinel for a 2001 article that Red Rountree once was a successful businessman who made his fortune in Houston by building Rountree Machinery Co.
Red Rountree married Fay in 1936 and her death from cancer in 1986 devastated him.
"After she died, I went crazy," he said in his prison interview with the newspaper. "I was the most lonesome man you ever saw in your life." He said he stopped associating with friends, neglected his business and started spending time in bars.
A year after his wife's death, when he was 76, he married a 31-year-old woman. He said he spent $500,000 putting her through a series of drug rehab programs.
They divorced and it was sometime after that - Rountree wouldn't say where or when - that he robbed his first bank. Money and revenge were motivations. A Corpus Christi bank that he'd done business with had forced him into bankruptcy, he told the newspaper, and he had never liked banks since.
When asked in 2001 what he would do when he got out of prison, Rountree said, "I might rob another bank. I'm not saying I will or I won't. But, hey, I might need to."
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