Bank robbed twice in five days

KINGSTON, N.Y., April 1 (UPI) -- A bank was robbed twice in five days, with police north of New York City hunting the first bandit after arresting a suspect in the second heist, police said.

The KeyBank branch in a busy Kingston, N.Y., business district was open for business Wednesday after being robbed by a lone gunman of an undisclosed sum of cash Tuesday and the Friday before, police said.

Matthew Bonse, 28, living in a motel just outside Kingston, was charged with first-degree robbery and third-degree grand larceny in Tuesday's robbery, police said.

Police issued an arrest warrant for Friday's holdup suspect, identified as Robert Bickelman, 49, who had lived in a Middletown, N.Y., motel 60 miles away and was at large, Kingston Detective Lt. Timothy Matthews said.

He said Tuesday's robber entered the bank, a unit of Cleveland's KeyCorp, at 3:58 p.m., showed a teller a handgun, received "a sum of cash" and fled -- all in under a minute, the Daily Freeman newspaper in Kingston reported.

The robber didn't take money from multiple tellers, as Friday's suspect did, and didn't order anyone in the bank to get down on the floor, Matthews said.

No one was injured in either robbery but after Tuesday's heist, some bank employees, having gone through an almost identical ordeal Friday, were "very shaken up," Matthews told the newspaper.

Matthews told the Daily Freeman that it was possible the branch was targeted again because the Friday robbery made headlines.