Sharon 'motorcycle bandit' pleads guilty

By Christy Mullins - The Herald

One of two “motorcycle bandits” — men convicted of robbing banks and escaping on a motorcycle hidden inside a moving truck — will spend 25 years in prison after he pleaded guilty Tuesday to holding up a western York County bank last year.

Jermaine Tyrone Fuller, 27, of Ridge Springs has spent nearly a year in jail after police charged him with armed robbery, criminal conspiracy, possession of a firearm during a violent crime, and entering a bank with intent to steal in the Dec. 4 armed robbery at First Citizens Bank in Sharon.

Fuller fired his attorney this fall and decided to represent himself in his own trial, said prosecutor E.B. Springs, who tried the case.

The court process began yesterday, but this morning Fuller told Judge John C. Hayes that his conscience had weighed on him overnight and he decided to come clean. He tearfully pleaded guilty to all four charges.

Fuller’s accomplice, 32-year-old Kelvin Sheron Settles of McCormick, pleaded guilty in September to aiding and abetting armed robbery, aiding and abetting kidnapping, entering a bank with intent to steal and conspiracy, all in the same incident last year.

In similar schemes last fall, the FBI investigated a half-dozen South Carolina bank robberies in which the suspect sped away on a motorcycle, wearing a thick helmet that “looked like an insect,” Springs said. But after the robberies were reported, police couldn't find the motorcycle, even after blocking roads and doing traffic stops.

But “if it weren't for a curious lady on a country road with a digital camera, they wouldn't have gotten away with this,” Springs said about the robbery at First Citizens Bank in Sharon.

On that day, the getaway vehicle was spotted on rural Locus Hill Road road by a woman on her way to the store, Springs said. What she saw was a large U-Haul moving truck with the back cab open and a driver in the front.

So the woman took a picture, Springs said.

When the woman returned home and learned that the only bank in the town of Sharon had been robbed, she called the York County Sheriff's Office to show police the photo she had taken earlier that day on her new digital camera.

Investigators traced the U-Haul's license plate number to a rental station in Columbia, and with some research they found Fuller and Settles in a motel room with close to $51,886 in a black bag, Springs said.

In court today, Fuller apologized to two of the three bank tellers he held at gunpoint in December, all addressing them by first and last name.

The tellers were too nervous to give statements to the judge, but Springs said the incident haunts them daily.

Fuller’s mother said the news that her son had robbed a bank was “shocking.”

“In all his years at home, he never stole anything,” she said. “His father and I were never even suspicious.”

She said she was thankful that her son’s bond in January was so high, the family couldn’t afford to get him out of jail: “His time here has brought on tremendous changes.”

She hugged her son one last time before hearing the sentence.

Fuller took $73,000 from the bank’s drawers and vaults, leaving about $23,000 unrecovered.