Robbery follows bomb threat

Coeur d’Alene police officials have considered that a bomb threat to the Hagadone Corp. offices Tuesday morning may have been an attempted diversion for a bank robbery about 15 minutes later.

It’s possible that an anonymous caller who said three bombs were left at the office building next to the Coeur d’Alene Resort was part of a ploy to divert attention from the Bank of Coeur d’Alene on Northwest Boulevard, Sgt. Christie Wood said.

“A number of us had the same thought,” Wood said. “It’s certainly a possibility, but how could we prove it?”

At 9:42 a.m., a man described as white, in his 30s and around 6 feet tall with a medium build, blue eyes and very short blond hair entered the bank, pointed a gun at tellers and demanded cash, said Don Robinson, supervising agent of the Coeur d’Alene FBI office.

The robber ran from the scene and witnesses said he was wearing dirty white gardening gloves, a black hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled over a stocking cap, a white tank top underneath the sweat shirt, blue jeans and white tennis shoes. He was carrying a dark green or black camouflaged backpack, according to police and dispatch descriptions.

Robinson said there was no usable security camera video footage of the robber to help identify him.

Coeur d’Alene police searched for the robber throughout the morning and used a K-9 unit to try to track him near Winton Elementary School. Officers also questioned people on the street around Ironwood Avenue near Kootenai Medical Center.

During the search, dispatchers told police the man had pointed a long-barreled “Saturday night special,” a slang term for an inexpensive handgun.

When asked whether his agents considered the bomb threat to be a decoy, Robinson said that was not an unreasonable speculation but could not confirm that it was the case.

“Generally, we in law enforcement are not believers of coincidence,” he said.

Wood said that although officers were deployed to the Hagadone offices on the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene to check out the bomb scare, it was not the whole force.

“We’re not a one-horse town,” she said, “with one policeman where you can create a diversion.”