SAN FRANCISCO — On Sept. 16, 2020, two masked men burst into a Tri Counties Bank branch in Eureka, pointed a replica semi-automatic pistol at the clerk and left with $32,916 in cash.
The robbers split up the loot relatively evenly and went their separate ways. Police eventually tracked down the pair and the money, but doing so required officers to trudge through the Northern California woods on a modern-day treasure hunt led by one of the suspects.
The man who led police to more than $15,000 in cash he’d buried in the Humboldt County woods has been identified in court records as 37-year-old Wyatt Waylon Whitlow. On April 27, in a federal courthouse in San Francisco, Senior U.S. District Judge William Orrick sentenced Whitlow to five years in prison, the same sentence Whitlow’s co-defendant, Nolan Colegrove, received in 2021, court records show.
Police solved the robbery in a matter of hours, after tracking down an abandoned Ford F-250 truck registered to Whitlow that contained evidence used in the robbery, such as the fake gun and boxes that had once contained the stolen cash. Whitlow initially reported the Ford stolen in an apparent attempt to cover up the crime, but after authorities raided his room at a nearby Comfort Inn, he copped to the robbery and led police to the forest, where the bulk of his share had been buried, prosecutors said.
Colegrove, meanwhile, was arrested on Sept. 25, 2020, on an unrelated warrant, but also confessed to the crime, authorities say. Though he was jailed just nine days after the robbery, that was apparently enough time for him to blow the $17,544 he’d taken as his share. He allegedly told the feds he’d spent it all on “a vehicle, gambling, and heroin.”
Whitlow pleaded guilty to the robbery in February 2021 and was released from jail while awaiting sentencing. But just two months later, he was arrested in a home invasion robbery investigation and ultimately sentenced to 16 years in state prison. Orrick allowed the bank robbery sentence to run concurrently.
Whitlow’s children offered pleas to Orrick for a lenient sentence, telling the judge they believed their father had changed his ways.
“I know that my dad is loving and caring and would always support me and my siblings,” Whitlow’s 12-year-old son wrote in a letter to the court. “And I really enjoyed spending time with my dad…He taught me how to surf and would always take us on adventures.”
