The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office says automated license plate readers and traffic cameras located the vehicle used in a bank robbery on Friday afternoon. The claim arrives with the Board of County Commissioners due to take up on Tuesday whether those cameras may stand in a county right of way. News4JAX published the agency’s account of the robbery and the arrest on Saturday afternoon at 5:52 p.m.
According to that report, a person entered a Regions Bank just after 3 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 16, armed with an AR-15-style rifle and wearing a face mask, gloves and dark clothing. The same report says that person demanded money and threatened violence, and left with an undisclosed amount of cash handed over by employees of the bank. Those employees described the vehicle that left as a white Audi sedan with white tape covering its license plate.
The Sheriff’s Office told that outlet that traffic cameras and plate readers picked up a vehicle matching the description near St. Johns Parkway minutes afterward. It also said investigators at the agency’s Real Time Intelligence Center identified the same vehicle from before the robbery, when the plate was not yet covered. The report gives 3:23 p.m. as the time that vehicle was located at an apartment complex.
A person was taken into custody inside an apartment at that complex by the agency’s SWAT team, according to the same report. The report says the complex was locked down and one building evacuated before that happened. It also says a search of the residence produced an AR-15-style rifle and the clothing employees had described.
What the fifteen minutes refers to
Sheriff Robert A. Hardwick is quoted in that report as saying, “From the time the robbery was reported, the suspect vehicle was located within about 15 minutes.” That sentence is about the vehicle rather than about the arrest, and the difference is the one Tuesday’s record will be read for.
The St. Johns Citizen published its own account at 7:13 p.m. on Friday, which was the evening of the robbery itself. That report says deputies responded just after 3 p.m. and that the suspect had fled before they arrived at the bank. It says investigators later located the suspect’s vehicle at an apartment complex, and that the search remained ongoing as of the agency’s 5:40 p.m. update.
The same report says the agency advised residents to expect a heavy law enforcement presence near that complex. It also says, in its own words, that authorities had not released details about the robbery. Both outlets attribute their accounts to the Sheriff’s Office, which has published nothing about this case on its own news index, where the newest of eight items is dated Aug. 7.
The two outlets give different streets
The two accounts do not agree on where any of this happened. News4JAX gives the bank as standing on St. Johns Common Parkway and the apartment complex as the Ascend Luxury Apartments on Mossy Pine Lane. The Citizen gives the bank as 130 St. Johns Commons Road, across County Road 210 from St. Johns Golf & Country Club, with the complex on Peyton Parkway near State Road 9B.
This newsroom has not read a charging document in this case and has not obtained an incident report from the agency. So neither of those addresses is confirmed here, and neither is the list of charges. The charges named in the News4JAX report are armed robbery with a firearm, grand theft, aggravated assault with intent to commit a felony in five counts, and wearing a mask or hood while committing a felony.
Where the sheriff’s figures come from
The News4JAX report attributes a set of 2026 department figures to the sheriff. They are 29 stolen vehicles recovered, 23 stolen license tags recovered, 35 wanted people arrested, 62 people charged, 132 felony charges and 54 misdemeanor charges cleared, and 35 missing people recovered. The same report gives the agency’s camera count as approximately 182 and says roughly half of them would be removed under the state’s directive.
It also says the sheriff told the station those removed cameras would not be relocated anywhere else in the county. All of it reaches a reader of this paper as figures a television station reports the sheriff citing, and that is the standing those figures have here.
Whether any of them also sits inside the nine documents the Sheriff’s Office published on Oct. 13 is not something this newsroom can establish by searching. Most of those documents are page images carrying no text layer, and the contract alone runs 124 pages of which 118 hold no readable text. A figure inside a scan is found by a person reading the picture, and the pages carrying these counts have not been found.
What can be established is narrower than that. Those figures are not in the one-page backup filed with Tuesday’s agenda item, and the county publishes no count of plate reader cameras standing in a St. Johns County right of way.
Tuesday
The board meets at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 20, in the County Auditorium at 500 San Sebastian View. Item 1 is headed Discussion on License Plate Readers in County Rights of Way, and the heading on its backup form reading SUGGESTED MOTION/RECOMMENDATION/ACTION is followed by no text at all.
The Tattler sent six written questions to the Sheriff’s Office about the plate reader program on Sept. 11 of this year. The stated deadline on them was 5 p.m. on Sept. 14, none of the six has been answered, and the offer to run any answer at the top of that story stands.
Minutes of a regular board meeting are approved at a later meeting of the same board. The two regular meetings after Tuesday are Nov. 3 and Nov. 17, both at 9 a.m. in the same room. The Tattler is tracking the case reported here and will publish its outcome.
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