A Prince George's County man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his part in a botched Crofton bank robbery.
Quick-thinking tellers were able to foil the March 22 heist and temporarily trap 26-year-old Darell Alfred of Springdale inside a vestibule at the Arundel Federal Savings Bank on Davidsonville Road.
But prosecutors credit the hard work of police and forensic investigators with definitively proving he was the masked gunman and almost forcing the convicted felon to plead guilty this week to attempted robbery.
If the case had gone to trial, prosecutors planned to show the jury DNA evidence, shoe impressions, ballistics and gunshot residue linking rolex replica Alfred to the crime.
"It helped greatly in an age where jurors expect to see DNA or 'CSI'-type evidence," said Assistant State's Attorney Brian Marsh, referring to the popular "Crime Scene Investigation" television franchise. "It is probably why the case ended up in a plea like it did."
Richard Finci and Stockton Benfield, Alfred's defense attorneys, did not return calls for comment.
Alfred walked up to the bank about 10:30 a.m. and entered the front door, according to police and prosecutors. A teller noticed the man as he approached, saw he was wearing a ski mask and holding a gun, and pressed a silent alarm that locked the interior doors to the vestibule to keep him out of the bank.
A metal detector built into the bank's security system then locked the outside doors, trapping Alfred inside the vestibule, Marsh said.
Alfred ultimately shot a hole in the outside window and kicked out the shattered glass. He then ran to a waiting pickup, hopped into the passenger seat and left the scene.
Police stopped a truck matching the getaway vehicle's description a few minutes later on Route 50 near Interstate 97. Maurice Antoine King, 25, also of Springdale, was driving and
Alfred was in the passenger seat. Also inside the truck: a gun, mask and gloves.
Detectives suspected Alfred was the gunman from the clothes he was wearing, but Marsh noted that defense attorneys might rolex fake be able to create reasonable doubt if he couldn't say definitively which man was holding the gun.
Police sent numerous pieces of evidence recovered from the truck and bank to different crime labs, some of which are out of state.
Glass imbedded in Alfred's shoe was "similar" to the glass broken at the bank, Marsh said. The shoe's tread also was "similar" to impressions left at the scene and DNA recovered from the mask "did not exclude" Alfred, while it did exclude King.
Finally, technicians matched the gun to a shell casing recovered at the scene and confirmed the presence of gunshot residue on the gloves recovered from the truck.
Marsh stressed that while television programs like "CSI" and "NCIS" make it look as if DNA and other forensic evidence is found at all crime scenes, it is actually fairly uncommon for police to find this much forensic
embroidered patches evidence.
"A lot of times we end up with one witness' word against another," he said.
Alfred was convicted of armed robbery in 2006 in Montgomery County. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but a judge suspended the last year of the sentence.
State sentencing guideline
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