Busy Day at the Albertsons

We stopped by our neighborhood Albertsons grocery store to pick up stuff for dinner and found four Orange County Sheriff's cars out front. The store has a bank branch inside and that's where all the excitement was:

A retired Long Beach police officer pinned down a suspected bank robber this afternoon inside an Albertsons grocery store.

Authorities identified the suspect as Tony Baik Fennell, 52, of Las Vegas, who they said was believed to be involved in at least four to five bank robberies from Norco to Utah and at least two of them in Orange County.

The suspected robber - who weighs about 200 pounds and is more than 6 foot tall - was wearing a black and white jogging suit when he approached a teller at about 12:30 p.m. at the Bank of America inside the Albertsons at 25872 Muirlands Blvd. in Mission Viejo, according to the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

The suspect had a demand note that stated he had a gun and would use it, said Jim Amormino, spokesman for the sheriff's department.

When sheriff's deputies arrived, the man was being held down by two witnesses, including the officer.

A woman, who is a retired Long Beach police officer, was at the grocery store and heard someone say the bank was being robbed, Amormino said. She saw a suspicious person walking away from Bank of America and she took him down using her police training. She was not armed, he said.

Another Albertsons customer helped her hold him down until deputies arrived.

The officer, who was not identified but described as being about 5-foot-7-inches and about 125 pounds by the sheriff's department, was matter of fact about the arrest, Amormino said.

"Once it is in your blood, it's in your blood," he said. "She took him down alone and had him in a headlock and another man came to assist her (but) she brought him down by herself."

Fennell was in federal custody in Santa Ana.

Nice work by the retired cop and whoever else assisted. The branch is well back in the store and they've been robbed before. I can't think that walking through a crowded check-out area after a robbery is the smartest thing a bad guy could do, but then bad guys are usually not all that smart.