Bank robber pleads guilty

Other suspect’s charges dropped

Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008

The case against Valeriy V. Kouznetsov, now 24, of Rockville was moved last spring to Montgomery County, with the consent of a St. Mary’s judge and lawyers in the case. Kouznetsov pleaded guilty on July 24 to armed robbery from the Aug. 17, 2007, incident at the Bank of America branch in Mechanicsville.

Kouznetsov already had pleaded guilty to carjacking and attempted robbery charges from taking a woman’s car from her in Rockville less than two hours before the bank holdup. St. Mary’s State’s Attorney Richard Fritz said Tuesday that Kouznetsov could be sentenced next week to up to 10 years in prison for the bank robbery charge, consecutive or concurrent to his penalty in the other case.

On Friday, the prosecutor dropped all charges against David A. Concepcion, a 34-year-old Rockville resident, from the St. Mary’s bank robbery.

‘‘Concepcion was the driver, supposedly,” Fritz said this week at his office in the St. Mary’s courthouse, but only Kouznetsov’s statements to police supported that accusation.

‘‘There is no corroboration of the codefendant,” the prosecutor said. ‘‘Not a single person at the bank can say ‘I saw that [other man] driving the car away.’”

A customer spotting the getaway car’s speedy departure thought that someone other than the robber fleeing the bank must have been driving, Fritz said. That was not adequate evidence in the St. Mary’s case, he said, and neither was a witness’ claim that Concepcion had been spotted at the scene of the carjacking in Montgomery County a half hour before it occurred.

‘‘Sometimes you get the whole pie. Sometimes you get half the pie,” Fritz said. ‘‘We got the guy who actually went in the bank and robbed the bank.”

Concepcion earlier pleaded guilty to a theft charge in the carjacking incident in Montgomery County. He also is scheduled to be sentenced later this month.

Ten days after the bank holdup, the two men allegedly seized another car and took it to a bank in Rockville the next morning, police reported, and a police sergeant later followed the vehicle to Silver Spring, where Kouznetsov and Concepcion were arrested. Police also found a replica of a semi-automatic handgun.

St. Mary’s detectives from the Bureau of Criminal Investigations in were notified, and the car used in the St. Mary’s robbery was found abandoned at a parking lot in Prince George’s County. None of the approximately $10,000 taken from the St. Mary’s bank was found at the time of the suspects’ arrest.