Bank robbery couple sentenced to prison

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - A husband and wife who robbed a bank together and led police on a wild chase were sentenced today to federal prison.

Adam Quincy Jones was ordered to spend 13 years in prison for the Sept. 28 robbery at the Comerica Bank branch at 857 Four Mile Road NW. He had pleaded guilty to bank robbery and using a firearm.

Then, just minutes after he left the courtroom, his wife Tammy Jo Jones was sentenced to 6.5 years for helping with the robbery. She drove the getaway Budget rental truck.

Adam Jones had nothing to say before U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist sentenced him, but his wife told the judge she was sorry.

"I'm not going to make any excuses," she said. "What I did was wrong. I put a lot of people in danger."

Adam Jones used a gun he bought on the street to rob the bank, getting away with nearly $76,000. He got away on a bicycle, then rode to where his wife was waiting in a Budget rental truck. They led police on a chase through the Grand Rapids area, tossing cash along the way.

Police finally caught up with them behind a Grandville Avenue SW school.

In a sentencing memorandum, Adam Jones' defense attorney painted a picture of a man driven by desperation.

In mid-August, the couple scraped up enough money for a bus trip from Florida, where they were living, to Grand Rapids, where his stepdaughter was in the hospital with a life-threatening blood clot, the attorney wrote. They stayed in a cramped apartment infested with bed bugs and slept on the floor, the document states.

In desperation to return to Florida, they came up with the plan to rob the bank, the attorney wrote.

Judge Quist wasn't impressed by the story of desperation.

"No amount of desperation ... can either justify or mitigate" the robbery, or the chase that endangered the public and police, he said.

The judge also today admonished members of the public who pocketed some of the bank money that littered the getaway trail. The feds say more than $16,000 is still missing.

"It just continues the crime," Quist said. "They know the money's not theirs and they should return it."