Police say they nabbed bank robber when he returned his getaway car – a rental

San Gabriel police arrested a man suspected of wearing a skeleton mask and brandishing a handgun during a robbery of a busy bank Friday when he showed up in City of Industry to return the rental car they say he used as a getaway vehicle.

Detectives surveilling the Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Industry took 51-year-old Hubert Sing Chung into custody when he arrived at around 9:40 a.m. on Saturday, June 30 to bring back the silver Toyota Corolla identified by witnesses who were at the bank during the robbery.

Shortly after the arrest, San Gabriel police served search warrants at Chung’s primary residence in Rowland Heights and his second home in Montebello, said Lt. Riki Nakamura.

At the Rowland Heights home, Nakamura said, police found a stash of weapons, including nine rifles and several handguns, as well as ammunition cartridges and “numerous” rounds of ammunition. He said police believe they found the handgun used during the robbery during this search.

They also found the clothes Chung was believed to have been wearing — the skeleton mask, as well as a black jacket and blue jeans — during the robbery on Friday, he said.

At the second home in Montebello, he said, police also found several more handguns. Between the two homes, they found 21 handguns total.

The arrest and home searches came less than a day after the robbery of the Citibank in the 500 block of Valley Boulevard.

The crime occurred on Friday at 2:40 p.m., when the bank was busy with about 20 people inside, Nakamura said. After parking the Toyota outside, a suspect entered the bank wearing the mask. Surveillance footage viewed by detectives showed the suspect calmly passing by several exiting customers.

The suspect walked up to the counter, then pointed a black handgun at a bank teller and demanded money. While the teller was collecting the cash, the suspect turned around and pointed the handgun at nearby customers; it wasn’t clear what the man said to them, but Nakamura said he believed he told them to move away.

After receiving several thousand dollars worth of cash, the suspect fled to the Toyota outside, police said, then drove away.

Nakamura said officers who arrived got the license plate number of the vehicle from witnesses. When the license plate came back as a rental car, detectives contacted Enterprise and discovered the contract for the vehicle would expire Saturday morning.

Nakamura said San Gabriel investigators contacted the FBI to see if the suspect was connected to any other robberies in the area, but none came back with someone with the same description or behavior as their suspect.

Despite the presence of so many weapons found in the homes, Nakamura said the use of a rental car and the decision to rob the bank at a busy time of day led detectives to believe that the man hadn’t done this before.

“My gut feeling on this is that this is his first robbery,” Nakamura said.

Chung has no criminal record, Nakamura said.

He was booked at the Alhambra Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail. He is scheduled to be arraigned at the Alhambra Superior Court on Tuesday.