Manhunt Seals Off Three Elementary Schools

Children and teachers at three elementary schools near Seal Beach were locked in for six hours Wednesday as police officers with dogs combed the area for a bank robbery suspect.

“I did my homework,” Lindsey Miller, an 8-year-old third-grader at Lee Elementary School in Rossmoor, said of the ordeal. “All of us were curious, and a few of us were scared. I was kind of scared--they really didn’t tell us much.”

The other two schools affected were Weaver and Rossmoor Elementary schools, an Orange County sheriff’s spokesman said.

The incident began about 11:30 a.m. when five men armed with handguns held up a Union Bank branch on Adams Boulevard in Huntington Beach, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said. After ordering bank employees and patrons to lie on the floor, the men escaped in two cars with an unspecified amount of money.

One of the cars--a Chevy Suburban--was later stopped on the northbound San Diego Freeway at Cherry Avenue in Long Beach and its two occupants arrested without incident.

The second car, a brownish-red Buick Regal, led police on a 100-mph chase on the same freeway to Seal Beach Boulevard, where it exited into Rossmoor, an unincorporated area near Seal Beach, and parked in front of a house on Inverness Avenue. The three occupants ran through a backyard where they briefly held a resident at gunpoint, then fled in separate directions, Amormino said.

Two of them were apprehended a few blocks away, he said, but the third managed to elude police.

About 35 officers from the Sheriff’s Department and Huntington Beach Police Department set up a two-mile perimeter and began searching the area with two helicopters and six dogs, Amormino said. The three elementary schools, which were inside the perimeter, were “locked down” about noon, he said, to lessen the chance of a child being injured or a car hijacked during the search.

“Parents were advised not to pick up their kids,” Amormino said late Wednesday. “The suspect is definitely armed, and I’m sure he’s pretty desperate. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

Students were allowed to leave campus at 6 p.m., when they were escorted to their parents’ waiting cars.

The one suspect was still at large late Wednesday, police said. They had recovered one of the five weapons used in the robbery, but none of the money.