Mercy no more: Man gets 29 years for robbing Brinks truck after compassionate release

LOS ANGELES (CN) — A Southern California man who robbed a Brinks truck one year after a judge granted him compassionate release from federal prison — where he had served 27 years for a string of robberies — was sentenced to another 29 years behind bars on Friday.

Markham Bond, 62, was found guilty last year of robbing a Brinks driver at gunpoint in a bank parking lot near Los Angeles International Airport in August 2023 and escaping in a stolen car with $145,000 in cash. A year earlier, the Inglewood man had persuaded a federal judge to let him out of prison amid a 46-year sentence, claiming he had “aged out of crime.”

“I’m deeply troubled by the sophistication with which the crime was committed,” U.S. District Judge Wesley Hsu said at Bond’s sentencing in downtown LA. “This was not a spur-of-the-moment crime.”

The judge, a Joe Biden appointee, imposed the 25-year statutory minimum for Bond being a repeat offender convicted of using a firearm to commit a federal crime, which must run consecutive to the sentence for the robbery itself.

While Bond’s court-appointed attorney, Davina Chen, asked the judge to add just one day for the robbery, Hsu said that he didn’t think that would be appropriate and added 46 months for a total sentence of 346 months, or almost 29 years. Federal prosecutors had sought as long as 34 years in prison.

Prosecutors say Bond’s criminal history includes convictions for drug trafficking and bank robberies going back to the 1980s. Following a string of robberies in 1994, he was sentenced to 46 years in prison.

In 2022, he pleaded with a judge to let him out prison and give him a second chance, promising that “if granted compassionate release, I will never become an embarrassment to you for your decision in giving me, Markham David Bond, another chance at life.”

That proved to be a false promise.

Just hours after he had held up the Brinks courier, Bond paid a South LA jeweler $10,000 in cash for the store’s most expensive chains. He also treated himself to lavish purchases at Louis Vuitton, according to the government, and a trip to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands where he stayed at the Ritz Carlton and participated in an “Ocean Surfari."

The LA police officers found the stolen getaway car Bond had used during the robbery near his home in Inglewood, and in it a baseball cap with DNA that matched his.

When police searched his apartment in November 2023, they discovered a loaded semi-automatic pistol, a red maroon shirt Bond wore the day of the robbery and about $9,000 wrapped in plastic bags inside of a mini-fridge.

Chen argued at the hearing that her client had been let down by the system after he was released from prison in 2022. After having spent 27 years in a very structured prison environment, she said, Bond received no re-entry resources or supervision to help him deal with life outside prison.

He suffered from severe mental health problems, including paranoid delusions, and failed required drug tests without probation ringing any bells or alerting his public defender, according to Chen.

“He has a good heart and he’s capable of redemption,” Chen told the judge, arguing that a sentence of 25 years would at least give Bond some hope that he would leave prison before he died.

Bond himself told Hsu that he was deeply sorry for committing the robbery and apologized for failing the judge who had let him out of prison in 2022.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Haoxiaohan Cai said in response, however, that these were pretty the same statements Bond made just a few years ago when he asked for compassionate release.

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