Hero in Shootout Now a Robbery Suspect

An armored car driver honored as a hero during the 1997 North Hollywood bank shootout is suspected in the robbery of $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 suspects arrested last week in connection with the Sept. 3 heist of an Armored Transport Inc. vehicle driven by Campbell.

He told police two masked men carrying handguns hijacked his truck at Sherman Way and Orion Avenue and forced him to drive to a nearby alley, where they took half a million dollars and fled in a stolen van, authorities said.

A polygraph test and questioning by police later showed discrepancies in Campbell’s account, officials said.

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

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

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

Campbell also gave up his shirt to be used as a tourniquet for a wounded bystander.

On Tuesday, officers got a break in the armored truck case after Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies arrested Christopher Lee O’Connor, 24, on suspicion of robbing an ATM machine at an Albertson’s Food and Drug supermarket in Palmdale.

When authorities found large bundles of money bound with bank wrappers in O’Connor’s possession, he admitted his role in the armored car robbery, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. He also provided information leading to the other suspects, including Campbell, the LAPD said.

According to sheriff’s Sgt. Mike Griffin, O’Connor worked for an ATM servicing company and was responsible for filling the machines with cash. But he apparently had been taking money from them, Griffin said.

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

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

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