Man Denies Girlfriend Had Role in Holdup

A championship wrestler charged with bank robbery has denied that his blond soccer star girlfriend played any role in a December holdup, their lawyer said Thursday.

But Todd Hoult and Tabetha Garibay were presented to a U.S. magistrate in Santa Barbara on Thursday to face charges that he robbed a Westlake Village bank Dec. 14 and she drove the getaway car.

The two arrived at the hearing in handcuffs--she in a short pinstripe skirt and white Angora sweater, he in jailhouse blues--escorted by FBI agents.

While Garibay, 20, hurried sullenly into the building housing Magistrate Willard McEwen Jr.’s chambers, 23-year-old Hoult sauntered between his FBI escorts, making faces at a news photographer.

“Todd has expressed a lot of concern for Tabetha rather than himself,” said Shawn Perez, a Dana Point attorney who is speaking for Hoult and the Garibay family. “He was frantic when I spoke to him this morning. Here’s a kid who really cares about this girl. . . . He said, ‘There’s no way she was involved in a bank robbery . . . I just don’t want anything to happen to her.’ ”

The two had been dating for about four years at the time of Hoult’s arrest, Perez said.

Hoult had been living in northern Colorado, working for a hospital and seeking a job as a wrestling coach before his arrest in Ventura County, while Garibay was working at a Newbury Park telemarketing firm, Perez said.

He added, “I won’t say he’s denying he did it, I won’t say he’s admitting he did it, but he’s not going to let her take the fall for something she didn’t do.”

For Garibay’s part, she did not even want to be bailed out of the Ventura County Jail where both were being held Thursday, Perez said. She will, however, very likely be freed today once her family completes arrangements to pay her $25,000 bail, he said.

“I think she just wanted to crawl in a hole and die after this all happened, after the newspaper article and the media attention and all that,” he said. “From a personal standpoint, I feel very bad for the family because if the accusations are false, you can see what a ruckus this has caused.

“On the other hand,” Perez added, “if the accusations are not false, I feel sorry for her and for him both, that this event is going to change their lives. And it seems to me they’re going [in] a very different direction from the way they had planned their lives.”

Garibay’s father, Joseph Garibay, who lives in the Thousand Oaks area, declined to comment on his daughter’s arrest.

Meanwhile, Perez said, tabloid TV shows are clamoring for an interview with him, and an explanation of how two accomplished college athletes in love came to face federal bank robbery charges that could put them in prison for 20 years or more.

Garibay was a soccer-playing sophomore at Pepperdine University who had helped anchor numerous wins for the Newbury Park High School soccer team. Hoult wrestled for Moorpark College after graduating from Agoura High School in 1991, where he once won the Division 1 wrestling championship for the school in the California Interscholastic Federation.

The federal charges stem from a Dec. 14 robbery of Coast Federal Bank in Westlake Village.

Prosecutors say Garibay and Hoult arrived in a gold 1984 Corvette, and that Hoult ran inside the bank wearing a black ski mask, sunglasses and hooded sweatshirt, carrying a semiautomatic pistol.

There, Assistant U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte Jr. said, Hoult forced two to three employees and customers to the floor, vaulted the counter and robbed two tellers at gunpoint, escaping with $8,925 in cash.

He hopped back into the Corvette’s passenger seat, and Garibay drove off, according to Birotte.

Police and FBI agents later found the car abandoned in a shopping center off Avenida de los Arboles. Inside the car, they found two airplane tickets to North Carolina, where Hoult’s family lives, Birotte said.

Authorities said a friend apparently wired some of the holdup money on Dec. 18 to Las Vegas, where Hoult picked it up using the name Todd Preston. But Birotte said the friend will not be charged because he did not know the money was stolen.

Hoult was arrested Jan. 10 for the robbery and held on a charge of violating probation that he was serving for a 1992 burglary. He is being held in Ventura County Jail without bond, but very likely will be transferred to the U.S. Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, officials said. Arraignment for the pair in U.S. District Court in L.A. has not been scheduled.

FBI agents closed in on Garibay Wednesday night, arresting her at her workplace in Newbury Park.

Perez said Hoult believes the FBI may have pressured Garibay to see if she would say that he had committed the robbery.

“Just because someone was arrested does not mean they committed a crime,” Perez said.

Gary Auer, agent in charge of the FBI’s local office, declined to comment on that allegation.