Hero of ’97 Shootout Held in Heist : Crime: Armored car driver who helped police and bystanders during the N. Hollywood bank gun battle is arrested in the robbery of his vehicle.

An armored car driver who helped rescue police and bystanders during the 1997 North Hollywood bank shootout is suspected of helping to rob $500,000 from his own armored vehicle earlier this month in Van Nuys, police said Saturday.

David Campbell, 36, of South-Central Los Angeles, was one of six men arrested last week in the Sept. 3 heist of an Armored Transport Inc. vehicle.

Campbell received a bravery award from Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti shortly after the nationally televised Feb. 28, 1997, gun battle in which two men in body armor sprayed thousands of bullets from automatic weapons and held throngs of police at bay while trying to rob a Bank of America branch on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

During the shootout, police asked Campbell and his Armored Transport partner, Hector Quevedo, if they could use the truck as a cover. Instead of surrendering the truck, the two men drove it into the middle of the gunfire, providing police officers a shield.

Campbell also helped a wounded bystander by using his shirt as a tourniquet.

“They could have just said, ‘Sure,’ and let the cops take it away,” an administrative assistant for the district attorney’s office told The Times in 1997. “But instead they went into the war zone.”

Last week, however, police said they allegedly linked Campbell to the armored truck heist.

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Campbell told police two masked men carrying handguns hijacked his armored truck at Sherman Way and Orion Avenue late on Sept. 3 and forced him to drive to a nearby alley where the suspects then fled with half a million dollars in a stolen van, authorities said.

A polygraph test and police found discrepancies in Campbell’s account, officials said.

On Tuesday, police got a break in the case when Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies arrested Christopher Lee O’Connor, 24, in Lancaster on suspicion of robbing an ATM machine at an Albertsons supermarket in Palmdale.

After deputies discovered large bundles of money bound with bank currency wrappers in O’Connor’s possession, O’Connor allegedly admitted his role in the armored car robbery and provided information leading to the other suspects, including Campbell, Los Angeles police said in a prepared statement.

An employee of an ATM servicing company, O’Connor was responsible for filling the machines with cash, said Sgt. Mike Griffin of the Sheriff’s Department’s Palmdale Station.

But O’Connor had allegedly been taking money from the ATMs, Griffin said.

Recently, O’Connor had allegedly been trying to replace the money he had taken with cash from the armored car heist, he said.

“[O’Connor] was not overly intelligent,” Griffin said. “Evidently the guy wanted to keep his job and seem legitimate.”

Other suspects arrested in the armored truck robbery include Christopher Baca, 30; Luis Perez, 30; Jose Fernandez, 24; and Raul Briceno, 24.

No one was injured during the robbery.