Bank Holdup Is a Desperate Cry for Help

On a cold and rainy day, Vernon Lamarr Clark says, he robbed a bank so he could go to jail, get fed, and stay warm and dry. He couldn’t think of any other way to get help.

Since the downturn in the construction industry left him jobless two years before, things have just gone to hell. After a while, the unemployment checks stopped coming. His wife kicked him out of the house. He was living on the streets, pushing a shopping cart and digging through trash bins, sleeping in cars abandoned in back alleys. He saw his four children infrequently. And he started drinking.

Without family to take him in, without a high school education, without the sort of safety net the policy planners talk about, the 51-year-old had become the homeless person he said he used to laugh at when he was welding steel on buildings and bridges, an ironworker with a trade that sustained him and his pride. All gone--in two years.

Clark’s slide underscores the grim realities that increasingly affect Americans caught in a bewildering economic downturn. It also illustrates the staggering human cost--the family breakups, the erosion of personal dignity--behind the faceless financial figures. From a street-level perspective, it points up the limited options facing a man out of work.

And it points up a sad truth. When the rest of America’s institutions could offer nothing to Clark, it was left to the justice system to figure out what to do with him--and for taxpayers to pick up the bill.

When, on Oct. 25, the cold began to bite and it started to rain and three 40-ounce bottles of Olde English 800 malt liquor had fortified him, Clark walked into a Union Bank branch in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood, thrust a wet brown paper sack at a teller and presented a note that asked for $40 or $50.

Clark claimed he had a gun, but he did not, according to an FBI report of the robbery filed in San Diego federal court. The teller, who looked scared, gave him $40, Clark said.

“I put on the note that I had a gun,” Clark said. “When I handed it to the lady, I seen her eyes light up and she started, like, shaking, you know. I said, ‘Please, I didn’t come here to harm you. Just give me $40 or $50. And I’m going to walk outside the bank and wait for the police to come arrest me.’ ”

To expedite his arrest, Clark motioned to the bank security guard, walked outside with him and told him to call police, the FBI said.

“I just sort of did it,” Clark said. “I need help. I needed somewhere to stay. It’s getting cold out there. It’s starting to rain. I don’t want to be out there in the rain, sleeping in cars, half eating. I just did it. I don’t know exactly. I just need help.”

The federal government answered Clark’s cry--it put him in a jail cell in downtown San Diego and charged him with bank robbery. If convicted, he could be sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Clark’s case has been set for trial Jan. 14 before U.S. District Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. He has pleaded not guilty.

At an Oct. 28 hearing, U.S. Magistrate Leo Papas set bail at $5,000, a remarkably low amount for an accused bank robber facing a potentially lengthy prison term.

Assistant U.S. Atty. John B. Scherling, the prosecutor on the case, declined to comment.

Clark’s lawyer, Nancy Kendall, a deputy federal public defender, asked in an interview, “What does this say about our government and our society that the man feels like the only thing he can do is commit a crime so he can get the help nobody will give him or listen to? “My take on this is that this is someone who has obviously been crying out for help for a very long time,” Kendall said. “Incarcerating him, just throwing him into jail, isn’t the answer. That’s part of the problem, not the solution.”

San Diego Municipal Judge Robert Coates, who wrote a book last year called “A Street Is Not a Home: Solving America’s Homeless Dilemma,” said Clark’s story is far too familiar.

“As the economy turns down, people lose their jobs,” Coates said. “When people lose their jobs, they get depressed, and the people around them get teed off. Substance abuse goes up. As that happens, their effectiveness goes down. And, pretty soon, they’re under a bridge somewhere.”

Stressing that he was not commenting on Clark’s guilt or innocence, Coates said that Clark’s circumstances are “not exactly a Horatio Alger story. Or something that would inspire Theodore Roosevelt to enthuse about American initiative.”

“It is a story of various brands of human cowardice, as presented on the surface of it,” Coates said. “But it’s not at all out of the ordinary. It’s a story that has a similarity to hundreds of thousands of people’s stories around this country.”

Clark is no angel. The idea of turning to crime to solve his problems is not a new one, though he did it this time in a new way. Twice before, he has been to jail.

He did 2 1/2 years in San Quentin and Folsom prisons for a Los Angeles burglary, leaving Folsom in 1972, he said. In 1983, according to San Diego court records, he was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. He said he tried to shoot a neighbor who had threatened his family.

For that, Clark was sentenced to a year in County Jail and five years’ probation. He served about six months and was released early for good behavior, records indicate.

Sitting in a too-low green plastic chair at the federal downtown Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego, so low that his knees stuck up into his chest, Clark insisted in a recent interview that he is not a criminal. Since coming to San Diego after leaving Folsom and learning a trade, he has done the right things, he said.

“When I got out of the penitentiary in 1972, I did everything I could to stay out of trouble,” he said. “I could have been in trouble millions of times since then. But I was working, I was content, I was happy, I had a family.

“I had everything a man could want in life,” Clark said. “It seemed like I lost it all in one day. Well, not in one day but, you know, the past two years.”

Clark grew up between San Diego and Los Angeles. Upon leaving Folsom, he came to San Diego for good at the bidding of two uncles in the construction business, who got him started learning the iron-working trade, he said. He joined the union in 1973 and was married in 1975.

There was the six-month interruption in 1983. But by all accounts, Clark worked steadily for years and had straightened out his life--until unemployment threw him a curve.

The business manager of Ironworkers Union Local 229 in Clairemont Mesa, Fritz Umscheid, said he has known Clark for years, calling him a “very likable person and a very good ironworker.”

When Clark was in trouble in 1983, a former business manager at Local 229, Vince Ryan, wrote a letter urging leniency, saying that Clark “had proven to be an honest, dependable man who is an asset to our trade.” In an interview, Umscheid said Clark was “nothing exceptional, but (he was) a good, steady worker at one time.”

There just hasn’t been steady work to offer Clark, or hundreds of others in the union, Umscheid said. With businesses eager to cut costs, what jobs there are often are contracted out to less-expensive non-union workers, he said.

Of the 730 active union members, about 40% are unemployed, Umscheid said. “By the first of the year,” he said, “40% will not have medical benefits to go to the doctor with.”

Umscheid added, “It’s horrible. I’ve been here 26 years. And this is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

When work slowed, Clark collected unemployment until the money ran out. Bored, he began to drink, preferably malt liquor, he said. His wife, Mattie, 37, told him he had to stop. They fought, and two years ago she turned him out. They remain married--technically, 16 years now--but separated.

“Lamarr, he’s a good person, a strong person, but I felt if I wasn’t there for him to depend on, he could do something for himself,” Mattie Clark said. “But I guess it didn’t work, because it’s all (fallen) apart.

“You know, instead of coming over and telling me what was going on, saying, ‘I have a problem,’ he’d come over and something would happen, and we’d argue,” Mattie Clark said. “I’ll survive. You’ve got to.”

In a two-room apartment on Market Street, near 47th Avenue, Mattie Clark lives with her 81-year-old mother, Elenora Butler; a son, LaVell Clark, 2; another son, Vernon Lamarr Clark II, 13; a 19-year-old daughter, DeVonnett Wells, and the teen-ager’s two children, a 2-year-old girl, Kiara Richardson, and a 9-month-old boy, Kenneth Richardson.

Another daughter, LaJuana Clark, 17, lives with a girlfriend. She gave birth Nov. 10 to a girl, Ty’anna Hunter.

When work was steady, Vernon Lamarr Clark said, he took home $20,000 or more a year. Mattie Clark said she has $850 this month to live on. About $352 of that is in welfare, $212 in food stamps and the rest from a part-time job at a Lemon Grove rest home where she said she tends to schizophrenics.

DeVonnett Wells said she has $826 this month in welfare and food stamps.

“My children, I think they all love me,” Vernon Lamarr Clark said. “The onliest thing I really miss about being here (in jail) is not watching my baby son grow up, being able to see my kids when I want to, I guess.

“But basically the last two years I haven’t been able to do anything to help them, you know,” Clark said. “That kind of hurts also, when you have kids, and they need this and they need that and you can’t do anything for them, because you don’t have it, you don’t have the resources to get it.”

Most days during the past two years, Clark said, he scrounged for aluminum cans, sometimes making $15 or $20 a day, sometimes not.

“I started pushing shopping carts up and down the alleys, digging in dumps, (making) just enough to make enough to exist on,” he said. “It was kind of humiliating and embarrassing, you know. I used to laugh at people doing that. Now I found myself in that position.”

Occasionally, the union would offer work, like one day last July, Umscheid said.

“I didn’t know (Clark) didn’t have transportation,” Umscheid said. “I guess he was going to work on the bus. He caught the wrong bus, evidently. He called me, to tell them he’d be late. But then I think they only worked him half a day or a day, I don’t know which, and laid him off.

“When I called to find out why, they said, ‘The guy showed up late.’ I explained (the circumstances). They said, ‘That’s his problem. We need him here when he’s supposed to go to work. And he came wearing tennis shoes and not tooled up.’ That’s the last time Vernon has worked.”

Wondering what to do, Clark said he considered working at a fast-food joint.

“I could have probably took a job at Jack in the Box or McDonald’s or something, you know, because I have no other skills, I don’t know anything, I don’t have a high school education,” Clark said. He finished the 11th grade, he said.

“But I don’t think I could do it,” Clark said. “They don’t pay enough. Minimum wages--a man my age can’t even live on what they’re paying. I can’t no live on no $4.25 an hour.”

So he took stock of what he considered his other options.

“I said, ‘Well, I could go out there and sell drugs.’ But I don’t want to sell drugs. I don’t want to get involved in that,” he said. “Then I said, ‘I could go out there and rob a grocery store and get me a place to stay.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. I might get shot.’ ”

One day, he said, he saw a crowd of homeless people sprawled out on sheets of cardboard behind a welfare office in Southeast San Diego.

“I didn’t want to end up like that,” he said. “So I just started thinking, ‘What can I do? How can I get some help?’ One day, I was about half drunk, I said, ‘Write a note and go rob a bank. Maybe you’ll get some help.’ ”

On Oct. 25, he wrote a note and robbed a bank. He said he regrets it.

“I really was sorry when I seen that lady shaking in the bank, and the note said I had a gun and I knew I didn’t and her eyes just lit up and she started shaking,” he said. “That really hurt the most.”

If he’s convicted, he said, “I have to accept that. I made the mistake.”

On the other hand, Clark already is in group therapy in jail. And he hasn’t had a drink since the day he walked into the bank, he said.

“I’m not bitching,” he said. “At least I’m getting three squares a day. I wasn’t getting that on the streets. I got a roof over my head now. I didn’t have that on the streets.

“This is not the way I want to be,” Clark said. “But I know I need help.”