Police in Burlington are reportedly pursuing some promising leads in their search for a man who used a fictitious bomb to hold up an area bank branch earlier this week.
As of 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the city’s police department had yet to identify the alleged culprit who entered My Select Bank at 166 Huffman Mill Road on Monday with a bag that he falsely claimed held an explosive device.
Although the suspect didn’t display any visible weapons during the robbery, he did leave the suspicious sack behind when he departed the bank.
Out of an abundance of caution, the city’s police officers evacuated the premises when they arrived on the scene at 10:40 a.m. The officers then asked their counterparts in Greensboro to dispatch their bomb squad to examine the contents of the ominous bag.
Emily Lynn Atkins, a spokeswoman for Burlington’s police department, recalled that the Greensboro bomb squad ultimately used a specialized robot to root through the bag without exposing any of its own officers to danger. Atkins added that, in the end, this remote-controlled bomb tech found nothing hazardous in the suspect’s discarded satchel
“There were no weapons or anything explosive in the bag,” Atkins acknowledged on Tuesday, “just some personal items.”
Atkins added that, since this anticlimactic conclusion, the city’s police department has followed up on some leads about the suspected perpetrator, who faces various charges for Monday’s robbery as well as the accompanying bomb hoax.
