Bandit Suspect Visited Police Before Capture : Crime: Now held in A’s Bandit robberies, David Malley went to S.D. police station April 16 to report Mission Beach traffic accident.

For two months, the A’s Bandit bedeviled police as he robbed 29 banks from downtown San Diego to Del Mar. But San Diego police may have had the closest encounter with the robber and not known it.

David Malley, 21, arrested on suspicion of robbing the San Diego Trust & Savings Bank in University City Friday and the FBI and Police Department’s prime suspect in the A’s Bandit robberies, walked into a Northern Division substation April 16 to report a Mission Beach fender-bender he was involved in two days earlier, police said.

“I remember the accident, and I remember the person, but I can’t remember exactly what he looks like,” said Officer Penny L. Miller, who questioned Malley about his accident report so she could complete her own report on the incident.

“He just looked like the typical college student who lives up here in this area,” she said.

Malley reported that he had been driving east on Ventura Boulevard in Mission Beach when another car pulled out of a parking lot and sideswiped his red Toyota Corolla on April 14, Miller said.

He called the substation on April 16 and asked Miller, who had been working the front desk that day, if he could report the accident even though it had occurred two days earlier, she said.

He said that the beach area had been too crowded to complete the report and wait for police at the scene, said Miller, who encouraged him to fill out an accident report form at the station house.

Malley said he had been on the Mission Beach roller coaster with his girlfriend and was leaving the area when someone sideswiped his brand-new car, Miller said.

“He didn’t seem too upset about it,” she said. “I guess I can see why, now.”

Miller said she had only seen a few bank photographs of the A’s Bandit, and they weren’t very clear. Apparently no one else working at the station that day recognized him either, she said.

Miller said Malley was unsure of the streets that made up the accident scene, which showed that he was unfamiliar with the area.

“The diagram (he completed) didn’t make sense, so I asked him about it,” she said. “I do so many (reports) every day that’s the only reason I remember him being there.”

She said she didn’t know the man was a suspect in the string of bank robberies until she was contacted by a newspaper Monday.

“I felt kind of dumb afterward,” she said.

Miller said she hasn’t yet taken much teasing from her colleagues--some of whom may also have been working the desk when Malley entered the station--but thinks she will after they read the paper.

“I wish I could have recognized him. It’s better to have the bright lights on you for being the one who caught him instead of the one who took the report from him and let him go,” she said, laughing.

As for other supposed sightings of the bank robber, who was described by police and FBI as brazen and uncommonly lucky, police documented about 30 such tips called in through the Crime Stoppers hot line, said Kelly Shay, a police officer who works with the program.

“Most were people who thought they knew him or people who thought they knew someone who looked like his pictures which appeared in the papers and on television,” Shay said.

The tips were forwarded to police and the FBI, she said. Others were just too vague to do anything about.

Although none of the tips actually led to the arrest of Malley, at least three people have called Crime Stoppers, which offered a reward for the arrest of the A’s Bandit, to claim the reward, Shay said.

Those calls were forwarded to the FBI as well, she said.

Recently, one man contacted Crime Stoppers and local media saying he was the A’s Bandit, said Police Department spokesman Bill Robinson.

The man claimed to be tired of robbing banks and wanted to turn himself in to police at a local bank, the first one on the A’s Bandit’s robbing spree that began in February, he said.

“I was excited,” Robinson said. “I had been following his inauspicious career since it began in February and had his picture etched in my brain.”

Robinson said he waited with six or seven robbery detectives on April 19 in unmarked police cars at a B Street bank for an hour and a half, but the man never appeared.