'Motorcycle Bandit' sentenced to 25 years for bank robbery

Sharon gunman pleads guilty to holdup last winter

By Christy Mullins - cmullins@heraldonline.com

The curious woman who snapped a photo on a country roadside and unwittingly helped detectives crack a bank robbery case last winter has put two men in prison for 25 years.

Prosecutors brought the photo to court Tuesday, ready to start the criminal trial of Jermaine Tyrone Fuller, the alleged gunman who stole $73,000 from the only bank in the western York County town of Sharon.

Pictured was a U-Haul truck parked on a country roadside, with the back cab open and a man in the driver's seat. Officials say Fuller and his accomplice, who was convicted in September, used the van to hide a motorcycle that Fuller rode to and from Sharon's First Citizens Bank the day of the robbery.

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But the photo never made it to evidence. The 27-year-old Fuller, who had fired his attorney and was ready to represent himself to a York County jury, said he woke with a guilty conscience Tuesday morning.

Fuller tearfully pleaded guilty to all four charges against him: armed robbery, criminal conspiracy, possession of a firearm during a violent crime and entering a bank with intent to steal.

Then he apologized to the judge, John C. Hayes III, for the confusion.

“I would never fault anyone for exercising their constitutional rights,” Judge Hayes told Fuller, who had begun the court process a day earlier with pre-trial arguments.

Fuller's accomplice, 32-year-old Kelvin Sheron Settles, 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.

Settles manned the U-Haul truck while Fuller rode the motorcycle to First Citizens Bank, prosecutor E.B. Springs told the court. After the robbery, authorities said, the men loaded the motorcycle onto the truck, closed the door and cruised out of town.

Last fall, the FBI investigated a half-dozen similar South Carolina bank robberies that involved the suspect speeding 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 stopping traffic.

Fuller and Settles, nameless suspects at the time, were known across the state as “The Motorcycle Bandits.”

On Dec. 4, their getaway vehicle was spotted on rural Locus Hill Road by a woman on her way to the store, Springs said. What she saw was a large U-Haul truck neatly tucked in the woods.

The woman took a picture, Springs said.

When the woman returned home and learned that the Sharon bank had been robbed, she called the York County Sheriff's Office to show authorities 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. With some research, they found Fuller and Settles in a Columbia motel room with close to $51,886 in a black bag, Springs said.

Around $23,000 remains missing from the holdup.

The woman, a resident on Locus Hill Road, did not want to comment on her discovery, she said by phone Tuesday.

In court, Fuller apologized to two of the three bank tellers he held at gunpoint in December, addressing them by first and last name. The third teller was scheduled to testify later in the afternoon.

“Someone had to stay and keep the bank open,” Springs said.

The bank employees who appeared in court were too nervous to give statements to the judge, but Springs said the incident haunts them daily. They stood trembling, feet away from the man who admitted to robbing them with a pistol.

But as real as the incident remained to his victims, 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 told the court. “His father and I were never even suspicious.”

Still, she said, she was thankful that her son's bond in January was too high for the family to get him out of jail: “His time here has brought on tremendous changes,” she said.

She asked the judge for mercy. Both men received 25 years in prison with no parole.