An Ohio man has been handed a 12-year prison sentence following a jury’s decision on an armed bank robbery case. Joel Alonte Travis, the 21-year-old Cleveland resident, fell under the hammer of justice dished out by U.S. District Judge Donald C. Nugent after being found guilty of violently robbing a Chase Bank ATM and threatening a service technician while armed. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Travis’s incarceration will be followed by three years of supervised release and restitution amounting to $112,440.
Details from the court documents highlight the incident on Oct. 16, 2024, in South Euclid, Ohio, where two masked men commandeered a technician servicing a drive-thru ATM in broad daylight. Armed with a gun to the victim’s head, they forced him to hand over cash cassettes brimming with currency. The quick cash-grab was efficient – the robbers, having filched roughly $112,440, vanished in a Hyundai Sonata, presumably to ponder on the brevity of illicit fortunes.
The turning point in the case came when investigators, tapping into Travis’s electronic monitoring device – due to his probation status from a previous unrelated crime – placed him at the scene. A search warrant of Travis’s apartment led to the recovery of three firearms, including one resembling the gun in the bank surveillance footage. To further seal his fate, Travis had shared photos on social media, flaunting large sums of money, a move that would subsequently tie a bow on the prosecutors’ case…