3 banks, 30 minutes, 1 question: Why?

TAMPA — The day before the men came with guns and badges, Cindy Carabeo was queen. It was Mother's Day, and she was a mom three times over, married to the same man for 28 years. Her family took her out for breakfast. Back home in Valrico, she dressed the bed with a pretty new quilt, their gift to her.The next day, after she had walked the two chihuahuas, showered, and waited for the younger girls to return from school, she went on the Internet, where she sometimes posted photos of her grandson.This time, she looked up how to rob banks.The 50-year-old woman collected the car keys from her middle daughter, declined an offer of company and walked past a sign her husband had put up at the door for her own protection. Do not go outside. She drove west, to Brandon, in a cluttered old Suzuki station wagon and pulled up to the entrance of a BB&T Bank.With her hair tucked in a baseball cap and red-rimmed sunglasses covering her brown eyes, she handed a teller a note.Carabeo stood there, all 4-feet-11 of her, waiting for her problems to go away."Should you not do as I ask," the note concluded, "I will not hesitate to SHOOT YOU."• • •It was written on Coca-Cola stationery with a faint silhouette of a soda bottle and a logo at the bottom of the page that said "Live Positively." Carabeo had lost her job at Coca-Cola Refreshments in the summer of 2014. The company let her go because of the way she acted on medication, she said.The drugs left her loopy, and she took several of them: Xanax, Prozac and Lyrica. That was why her husband had put the sign on the door. She was under doctors' care for anxiety, depression and fibromyalgia. She had worked in human resources, fielding employee questions.Former co-worker Katherine Garcia describes her as "beautiful, lovable, attentive, caring," though struggling with worries about health and money.Unemployment didn't help. Carabeo's family was living paycheck to paycheck, surviving on the generosity of relatives and what her husband earned selling ads for a shopper. She hadn't finished college but knew all about middle class math, how to subtract bills from pay on scrap paper and stretch what remained until something broke. Twice, she said, the electricity had been cut off.In the spring, she had come up with a plan to sell some of her clothes along the highway and reached out to Garcia. Was there anything her old friend wanted?By May, financial worries were growing. Carabeo's daughter was about to graduate from Durant High School. Cap, gown, ring, it all had a price. There had been talk of a graduation party, something small, for family, but it would still cost money."I told her you either get your graduation ring or you have a party," Carabeo said. "And she understands that. Or at least comprehends it."She can't understand why you have to make a choice. And life is going to be full of choices." • • •The banks were clustered like cherries south of State Road 60 and Kings Avenue in Brandon.There was BB&T at the corner; Wells Fargo, a block south on Kings; USAmeriBank, another block south, and Florida Central Credit Union a few blocks over on Oakfield Drive. The big black purse hit the BB&T counter with a thump, the teller would remember, even if she initially mistook Carabeo's note for a deposit slip and handed it to a colleague — who quickly returned."This is a robbery," the demand began. "Empty your tray and don't alert the guest or police. Do not give me any die pack of money. Should you not follow these instructions you will meet your maker."She meant dye packs. She had read a little about them on the Internet. Banks use them to spoil money stolen in robberies.The teller, a woman of 54, saw a flash of something shiny in Carabeo's bag and considered that there might be a gun. Despite the thump and shine, there was no gun. Carabeo, the evidence would show, had held up a bank packing a screwdriver, scissors and pruning shears ."Thank you," she said, leaving with $1,524, "and have a nice day."• • •Next up was Wells Fargo, its sign visible from the BB&T parking lot. A 21-year-old teller had just returned to work after family leave and was new to the branch.She unfolded the note, Carabeo's second. This one was written in Sharpie purple ink on spiral notebook paper. It, too, warned against a dye pack, or a "signal," threatening the teller with consequences."Happy Mothers Day," it ended.Carabeo would later say she had written what came to mind, but, by coincidence, the teller had just had a baby. They were two mothers, and one was terrifying the other. The teller looked up at Carabeo and hesitated. She wasn't sure of this bank's procedures, or the panic button location. She just stood there, until she saw the robber reaching into her bag, and then feared gunfire."Now," Carabeo said quietly.No one in the crowded bank noticed the teller's predicament. Not the man waiting to open an account, nor the woman applying for a loan, nor any of a dozen other witnesses. One employee was taking a late lunch when it happened; another, pulling ATM deposits.The teller handed Carabeo a stack of $100 bills totaling $2,000 and saw a nod of approval before the woman in sunglasses left.• • •Hillsborough County sheriff's Detective Jeffrey Jones happened to be less than a mile from Carabeo's townhouse when he heard about the first robbery.The 3:19 p.m. call from the bank had unleashed a swarm of deputies, FBI agents and crime scene technicians, with their fingerprint kits and yellow tape.A BB&T employee had jotted down a license plate number.Jones looked at the corresponding address for the white Suzuki Aerio, and turned back east, toward Kings Mill.The Carabeos lived off the highway in a townhouse complex that bordered on rural, closer to horse trails and strawberry fields than to gridlock and congestion, with a boot shop in one direction and a produce stand in the other.By the time the second robbery was reported, at about 3:35 p.m., Jones was sitting in an unmarked car inside the gates of Kings Mill. Another detective had the same idea and was en route. A K9 unit, too, in case she ran.Jones hoped she still lived there.• • •She wasn't done. Nor did law enforcement yet know the extent of her activity.At some point in the spree, she entered USAmeriBank with a note in hand but left after two employees insisted she remove her hat and sunglasses."I'll just go through the drive-through," she shot back.She made one final stop at 3:42 p.m.: Florida Central Credit Union on Oakfield Drive, not far from the Brandon Regional Medical Center.This time, she wrote the note on the back of her to-do list. On one side, it said, "1) Pay car, 2) Buddy's, 3) Dr. office, 4) surgery center, 5) laundry, 6) dinner," etc., and on the other side, it announced a robbery, again forbidding a dye pack.She bagged the day's biggest pile of cash: $4,785, at first glance."Oh, my God, she is leaving," the teller blurted out, alerting the others. One watched through the glass as Carabeo walked casually to her car, put the purse on the passenger seat and shut the driver's side door.Everything went up in smoke.• • •A typical dye pack is a hollowed-out bundle of currency built around a slender electronic receiver, paired with an incendiary device and red sulfur dye.The pack awaits a signal from a transmitter near the exit, then starts counting down a delay.On May 11, one heeded the call while disguised as $2,000.Suffocating red smoke filled the car. Carabeo's eyes and throat burned. She couldn't see to drive.She hadn't grasped what a dye pack did. She thought at first that something might be wrong with the car, but then realized the smoke was coming from a pocket in the purse. She said she nearly went back inside the bank."But I knew I needed to get home to the girls," she said, "so I just rolled down the windows."A teller looking out from the drive-through window saw smoke billowing from the car as it left the lot, going north toward State Road 60.The most direct route home would have taken 11 minutes, past the Catholic church, car dealers and trailer parks.She drove slowly, trying to make sure she didn't hit anyone.By the time she pulled into Kings Mill, the smoke had dissipated. She didn't go to her townhouse. Instead, she pulled up to a trash bin — with the idea, she said, of throwing away trash from the trunk.When she opened her door, she heard a man yell.She froze. Everywhere she looked, she saw the barrel of a gun.• • •Before this, Carabeo had no criminal record and an unblemished driving history. She was a registered voter. Shortly after she started at Coca-Cola, she wrote online that her employer liked her work ethic and she hoped for stability.She sent diapers to her eldest daughter and ironed her husband's shirts. "As Barry Manilow would say, LOOKS LIKE WE MADE IT!" she wrote for their wedding anniversary last year, and Jose Carabeo posted something similarly sentimental. Some days were harder than others. The repo man had visited, judging from court records. Along with periodic electrical outages, there was no Internet service, just a neighbor's borrowed Wi-Fi signal or excursions to the public library.It wasn't a bad life, but she wanted better for her daughters."She's an IB student," Carabeo said of the middle one. "She's in the top 10 percent of her class."On Facebook, Carabeo posted about a high school honor court banquet and a sweet 16 birthday cake. From afar, it all looked so normal. If not for hitting three banks in 30 minutes, she could have remained the mother next door.Instead, she would become fodder for the very Internet that had fielded her queries about robbery, and the nation would blink at her lightning speed."Faster than pizza," one headline marveled. They all took note: the Huffington Post, the New York Daily News, even the Facebook page of Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons, a man with a net worth estimated at more than $300 million. ("I can't even grocery shop in 30 minutes," one of his followers wrote.)When word got out that she did it partly to pay for her daughter's graduation party, the revelation no longer would be confined to America."Mother's Undying Love!!" teased a headline in the Nigeria News. • • •Instead of counting $6,309 in cash and picking out party favors on the evening of her crime debut, Carabeo ended up in an interview room at the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, across a desk from Detective Jones."I've been on several different medications," she told him, 40 seconds into it. "I'm seeing a psychiatrist."She hadn't had a Xanax since morning, and she usually took four a day for anxiety, she said. Plus, two or three Prozac pills for depression, two or three Lyrica doses for fibromyalgia, and something else for sleep.She didn't ask for a lawyer. She said she didn't need one."I'm hoping they'll let me go home," she said, her voice sounding worn. "I don't even have a ticket."For most of an hour, Carabeo stuck to a scattered story about depositing gifts from a daughter's birthday party, which continued as FBI Special Agent Viet Nguyen took over the questioning. After much back and forth, the agent told her what he knew from the bank tellers, all of whom had identified her.He showed her a copy of the first note, on Coca-Cola stationery. Did she think he would find her fingerprint?"Probably," she said.And why did she think that?There was a long pause."Cause I wrote the note."The investigators needed details to document her knowledge of the robberies. But at times, as they dug, she seemed befuddled by the facts they already had."I went to four banks?" she asked, recalling only two. She wouldn't be the first defendant to understate crimes, but she was otherwise cooperating, signing and dating her "to-do" list robbery note for them, identifying herself in bank surveillance photos."It feels like it's not me," she said, describing the woman in the picture as looking like a "thug."She cried, off and on. She had embarrassed her family, she said, and her husband wouldn't be happy that she had gone outside.That's why they're called mistakes, the agent reassured her. It wasn't the end of the world."This is a big mistake," she told him. "This isn't something that you just sweep under the rug."• • •In TV commercials, people on medications for pain — physical, mental or existential — walk dogs on blissful days while music cushions the list of side effects.They don't rob banks. They don't end up in U.S. District Court, the way Carabeo did on June 24. A judge, a prosecutor and a defense attorney discussed whether it was safe to temporarily spring her from jail, where she had been for seven weeks."She certainly jumped in with both feet first," prosecutor Rachel Jones said, making a case for detention. "She did not possess a gun at the time, but she did possess a pair of pruning shears and a screwdriver. And these women rightfully feared for their lives."Magistrate Judge Anthony Porcelli put Carabeo on house arrest to await trial, with assurances that she would receive mental health care and had family members close by.He called her behavioral shift "alarming" and alluded to early reports suggesting a connection to her medical treatment.At two subsequent court hearings, her attorney pointed to the possibility that prescription drugs had affected her judgment."They may have given her some kind of reaction," public defender Howard Anderson told U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore."Although it didn't amount to an insanity defense, it amounted to where she was not thinking rationally at the time."Makers of two of the drugs she used, Lyrica and Prozac, warn patients that "acting on dangerous impulses" may be a symptom of a serious side effect.Carabeo didn't contest the federal charges. She accepted a plea agreement, admitting to one count of interfering with interstate commerce, so that two other counts would be dropped.She is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 8.Even with a clean past working in her favor, she could face several years in prison.• • •For now, she's back to errands.At first she was required to stay inside her house, with electronic monitoring, and couldn't leave for appointments without her husband or daughter.But that put a strain on the family, her attorney told the magistrate judge in September.The new graduate had a job, the youngest daughter was in school and the eldest lived out of state. If the husband missed work, he didn't get paid.Four months had passed since the robberies, and Carabeo's situation was more stable. Her drug regimen had changed.Would a nighttime curfew be all right, so that she could shop and help run the household?The prosecutor didn't object.The judge said okay: Carabeo can go outside.But not into any banks. News researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Contact Patty Ryan at pryan@tampabay.com or (813) 226-3382.

3 banks, 30 minutes, 1 question: Why?

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