Monrovia police are looking for a woman believed to have duped a man she picked up as a day laborer into trying to rob a bank.
Joshua Locatell, 24, of Monrovia, was booked on suspicion of attempted robbery in the fiasco that included a lengthy standoff. He surrendered unharmed. Authorities, who spoke with his father and stepmother, described the man as mentally disabled.
Locatell was picked up at a day laborer site in Sierra Madre Wednesday morning and promised work as a painter. But Locatell told detectives that on the way to his supposed work site, the woman handed him a note and told him to deliver it to Citizens Business Bank, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times from Monrovia police Lt. Nels Ortlund.
The bank was closed, but he slid the note under the door. When bank employees read the note, which said that a remote bomb would be detonated unless they gave him money, they called police.
"[The bank employees] told him, we'll do what you want. Stay here," Ortlund told The Times.
A standoff ensued, and Locatell surrendered about five hours later. "He told us that he had been waiting for the people to come out with the money, but that he was tired and hungry," Ortland said.
Once police talked to his family, they released him into their custody, the Times reported.
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"They were able to provide enough information that we believed it would be the merciful thing to release this guy into the custody of his family. He has been diagnosed with some kind of impairment. There is clearly an abnormality," Ortlund said.
