NILES, Mich. – A big haul – more than $200,000 – during a 2007 heist at Berrien Teacher’s CU was enough of an enticement for a second try by a group of Indiana bank robbers, but a fatal one for one of the bandits.
Three of the bandits in the first robbery last week were sentenced to seven-year prison sentences. The fourth one, who went back for a second try, was buried last year – the result of a shootout with a security guard.
The four young men, identified as Travis Allen, 27, Antiowan Loftin, 26, Chester Higgins, 31, and Devarance Kimbrough, 31, drove up from Elkhart, Ind., on Oct. 11, 2007. Three of them: Allen, Higgins and Kimbrough, burst into the credit union brandishing guns and took it over, according to authorities. Loftin waited outside as lookout and getaway car driver. The robbers gathered the employees in the lobby and forced them to lie on the floor while they gathered cash from the teller drawers and the vault – a total of $207,000.
Impressed with the haul, Kimbrough put together another group and went back up to rob the same credit union a little more than a year later, on Jan. 18, 2008. This time, the robbers were confronted by an armed security guard. One of the robbers, later identified as Glenn Porter, 22, was shot once in the buttocks, and Kimbrough was shot twice in the chest and upper body. Kimbrough’s accomplices dragged him from the scene and dropped him off at a local hospital, where he died later that night. The other two robbers subsequently were arrested.
Porter was sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison and a third robber from that day, Tavis Curry, 21, was sentenced to seven years.
