Elkhart Lake bank robbery

A member of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department bomb squad (pictured) enters the Elkhart Lake office of the National Exchange Bank and Trust Thursday afternoon after a gunman robbed the bank earlier that morning and left behind a suspicious package.

According to the police report, a lone gunman allegedly entered the bank at 54 S. Lake St. round 8:30 a.m., shortly after it had opened. Apparently wearing a disguise including gray hair and a gray beard and mustache, the robber forced three tellers into the vault and made off with more than $10,000. He locked them inside the vault and left the package with blinking lights on it. He told the employees they would receive an electrical shock if they left the vault before the lights stopped blinking.

The tellers exited the vault using a key and immediately called police, but the robber had already fled the scene. He was wearing a dark sports coat, matching pants, a light colored baseball had and white tennis shoes, according to the tellers.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were called in and took charge of the investigation, according to Elkhart Lake Police Chief Randy Boeldt (inset, speaking with an FBI agent as a Sheboygan County Sheriff’s deputy looks on). Boeldt noted that it was the first bank robbery in the village in his 20- year tenure as chief of police and possibly the first ever in the village’s history.

Although Boeldt said the robber never said the package was a bomb, the bomb squad was called as a precaution and detonated the device. Neighbors of the building were evacuated as well as a precaution.

Thursday’s robbery is similar to a robbery last June of the Commerce State Bank in Cedarburg, which remains unsolved.