Man takes hostages in bank
By Laura Pelner
Campus
Editor
Alan Pearson had a hard time paying attention in
class Tuesday afternoon.
Pearson, a senior in the School of Liberal Arts,
was distracted and stared at the door for most of the 90 minutes he
was in Communication 352, "Mass Communication Law."
"I was waiting for my sister to come in and tell
me some bad news," he said.
Before class a fellow student told Pearson a man
with a shotgun entered a bank in Lowell, Ind., his hometown, and took
hostages. Pearson's mother, Lupe, works in a bank.
"When he first said it, it was weird," said Pearson.
"When I went home last Friday there was a fight in the bank, I was kind
of freaked out. (The classmate) said the wrong bank name. I was trying
to decide if it was my mom's bank."
It was.
Pearson's mother was one of nine people held hostage
Tuesday morning at the Lowell Centier Bank. The alleged perpetrator,
David Potchen, 39, of Lowell, entered the bank with a sawed-off shotgun,
took the hostages and asked for only three items – two Big Macs
and a pack of cigarettes. He exchanged two hostages for the items, according
to the Associated Press.
Lupe said the situation was scary but added the
man wasn't mean. "The man was very calm and he assured us nobody would
be hurt," she said Tuesday night. "I felt he was being honest. After
a while I was sure he wasn't going to hurt anyone. As long as we were
giving him what he wanted, we would not be harmed."
The man was true to his word; no one was injured.
Potchen reportedly entered Centier Bank around
9 a.m. and didn't surrender for hours. Hostages were released slowly
throughout the morning as police negotiators and FBI investigators worked
with Potchen and tried to establish a motive.
"He wasn't there to hold up the bank," Lupe said.
"He had not eaten, he wanted food and cigarettes before he even let
us know why he was there. That's what he wanted first. He never said
why he chose the bank."
Though no official motive had been released as
of Tuesday evening, Associated Press stories reported Potchen declared
bankruptcy four months ago and may have been unemployed.
Mike Arredondo, the chief of the Lake County Sheriff's
Department, told the Associated Press that when Potchen entered the
bank he told employees to make sure the alarm went off, authorities
were called and the media were contacted.
Lupe said the incident lasted about four hours
and she was the second-to-last hostage to be released. "That was kind
of hard," she said. "He was letting one or two at a time go. I kept
thinking 'my turn will come.' You hope not to be at the end because
you don't know what will happen."
As the first hostages were released Lupe told them
if anything happened to her to make sure her children knew how much
she loved them.
"I did think of the family practically the entire
time," said Lupe.
Throughout the afternoon the rest of her family
contacted and updated each other about the situation. Pearson said that
when he went home after his 1:30 p.m. class his sister was waiting for
him and there were messages on his answering machine from another sister,
girlfriend and friends from home.
"We have a lot of family in Hammond, (Ind.)," Pearson
said. "They all came to Lowell after they found out about it."
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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