A west Mobile man was headed to federal prison in the summer of 2014 after being sentenced for a bank robbery that sent him fleeing across state lines before his eventual arrest hundreds of miles away.
According to court documents, James Henry Crow walked into the Hancock Bank at 5212 Rangeline Road and handed a teller a note. The note, prosecutors said, indicated in substance that he did not want to shoot anyone or hurt a woman in the parking lot, and that the teller should hand over the money.
A getaway across three states
An agent testifying in the case told U.S. Magistrate Judge Katherine “Kit” Nelson that after the January 10 robbery, Crow slipped away from police at a nearby Walmart, where he changed clothes in a restroom. From there, he boarded a bus to Biloxi, Mississippi, continuing on toward Tucson, Arizona.
It was in Tucson that Crow was arrested. The agent said he admitted to robbing the bank and acknowledged daily marijuana use. Investigators said he had been using the alias “Mark Wright.”
The sentence
On Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge William Steele sentenced the 55-year-old to 41 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release and drug treatment. The judge also ordered Crow to pay Hancock Bank $5,190 in restitution.
According to a news release from U.S. Attorney Kenyen Brown, Crow was a four-time felon. Booking records showed he had been arrested several times before in Mobile County, most often on traffic and marijuana-related charges. In 1994, he had pleaded guilty to trafficking marijuana.
A familiar corridor
The Rangeline Road area, a busy commercial stretch on the west side of Mobile, was home to the bank branch at the center of the case. For customers and employees, the robbery was a jarring interruption to an ordinary day, even though the note contained no overt threat of violence.
The case moved through the federal system rather than state court because bank robbery is a federal offense, prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s office and heard in U.S. District Court. That framework brought the matter before Judge Steele, whose sentence combined incarceration with supervised release and court-ordered drug treatment — a nod to the substance use that the defendant himself had acknowledged.
The restitution order required Crow to repay the money taken in the robbery, a standard component of federal sentences intended to make victims whole. For Hancock Bank, the $5,190 figure represented the amount lost in the January holdup.
The path from a Rangeline Road teller window to an Arizona arrest underscored how quickly a local crime could ripple outward. Within days, a bus ticket had carried the defendant from Mobile through Mississippi and on toward the Southwest, only for the investigation to catch up with him and return the matter to a courtroom in his home city.
With the sentence handed down, the case drew to a close: a prison term, a period of supervision to follow, treatment for addiction and an order to repay what had been taken. For a defendant already carrying a lengthy record, it marked another chapter in a long history with the courts of Mobile County and, now, the federal system.