A California nurse convicted of robbing banks in her home state, Arizona and Utah, was sentenced April 7 to serve 66 months in federal prison and will have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in penalties. Sandeep Kaur, 24, of Union City, dubbed by the FBI as “The Bombshell Bandit,” was arrested in July last year, after a two-month string of robberies in which a well-dressed woman approached bank tellers and threatened to detonate a bomb if they didn’t hand over cash from their registers.
Kaur escaped with $21,200 from her first robbery at a Bank of the West branch in Valencia, California, on June 6 – the most success she had at any of the four robberies she pleaded guilty to, the St. George Spectrum reported. In subsequent robberies she grabbed $1,978 and $8,000 at banks in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and San Diego, respectively, before her strike on a St. George, Utah, bank led to her capture in July, eight weeks after her crime spree began.
Presentencing investigators established a recommended range of 78 to 97 months, the Spectrum report said. The court, however, was not bound by the sentencing guidelines, and the 5 1/2-year sentence issued by U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart was below the recommended amount.
Defense attorney Jay Winward asked the court for an even lighter sentence of four years in prison, citing the challenges of Kaur’s upbringing and ways in which she was “trapped” by her Sikh culture as she grew up, by family difficulties and by “bullies” in her society. “She is educated, she has great worth to society … and she does want to make amends,” the Spectrum quoted Winward as saying. He further added that Kaur found an escape after enjoying some success with stock market investments that allowed her to break away from her past.
But she fell into a new set of problems as the allure of Las Vegas drew her into a gambling addiction and other excesses. Kaur fled Las Vegas back to a boyfriend in what Stewart later described as an arranged marriage, but the romantic arrangement led to Kaur’s physical and emotional deterioration before she broke free and returned to Las Vegas, Winward said. There, she found herself in a “deeper and darker” predicament, he added.
Kaur, who was sent to India, but later returned to the U.S., graduated from high school at the age of 15 and nursing school at 19 and had no prior criminal history before the robberies.
According to District Judge Ted Stewart’s summary of events and explanation of his reasoning in issuing the sentence, Kaur expressed concern her family might be in danger as a result of her gambling troubles. Kaur also apparently reported that in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she and others were mistaken for Arabs and suffered some type of abusive retaliation.
However, her family painted a completely different picture in an interview a little while after Kaur had been detained in a high-speed chase. A family member told India Abroad that Kaur had recently been accepted for a master’s in health care at the California State University in Long Beach. “There is someone else behind all this,” the relative told said. “We are waiting for the curtain to open, for all the people to come out, adding that this was not her behavior and that money was never an issue.
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