Sun Valley bank employees recount terrifying encounter with 71-year-old robber

Tellers and security guards recounted the terrifying moments an apparent robber — who police later identified as a 71-year-old man who served four decades behind bars for previous bank robberies — stormed into two San Fernando Valley banks late last year, threatening them with violence if they didn’t comply with his demands, they said in a hearing inside the Van Nuys criminal courthouse on Tuesday, April 23.

After wrapping up a morning meeting with her employees, Nancy Esqueda was walking toward the front entrance of the Chase Bank she managed in Sun Valley on Dec. 21, 2023, when she saw her security guard being pushed inside, a man just behind holding something to the guard’s back.

“‘Nancy, call the police because we’re being robbed,” Esqueda said the guard yelled to her in testimony from the stand Tuesday.

Esqueda said the robber then pointed what appeared to be a gun at her and waved it around at tellers standing behind their registers. The man forced Esqueda to hold open a security door for him so he could get at his target — the tellers’ cash machines.

Ordering Esqueda and the guard to their knees, the robber then demanded cash from the tellers. One of them, Marcela Murillo, testified Tuesday that the robber “was getting impatient” with her as she frantically tried to withdraw cash from the machines.

Murrillo said the robber threatened to shoot all of them “in their kneecaps.”

The machines operate with a push of a button, but the only distribute $10,000 at a time.

“I told him, ‘She’s trying,’” Murillo said of another teller.

Bruce Edward Bell sat feet away, listening. Bell has been in custody since police arrested him just minutes after the Chase Bank robbery, pulling him over in a stolen Volvo, in which they found a replica handgun and $64,000 in cash.

Bell has spent much of his life behind bars — he was released from federal prison just three years ago, having served a 40-year sentence for four robberies he committed as a much younger man, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

LAPD detectives said the Chase Bank in Sun Valley was the final of several attempted and successful robberies by Bell, including two last October.

Bell was charged in January with two counts of second-degree robbery, two counts of attempted robbery and four counts of kidnapping, among other charges. He remains in custody on $1.6 million bail. Court records were not available showing whether Bell had entered a plea on any of the charges.

Bell told The Los Angeles Times in March that he had worked a series of jobs after his release from prison in 2021. Family members told the paper they were shocked the elderly Bell had apparently returned to robbing banks.

Murillo said the robber at the Sun Valley bank resorted to pilfering the tellers’ drawers of cash, pulling $14,000 out of one.

Video of the robbery released by police show the robber calmly walking out of the bank after shoving wads of cash in a bag. Murillo said the entire robbery lasted just minutes.

“It felt like forever,” she said.

Asked by a deputy district attorney if she feared for her life, Murillo broke down in tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “(I thought) that if I did not comply, he would shoot me.”