David Wayne Oliver Threw Academy Bank’s Cash on Tejon Street, Shouted Merry Christmas, Then Told a Deputy He Was Not Going Back to Jail

COLORADO SPRINGS — David Wayne Oliver did not run. On the afternoon of December 23, 2019, the 65-year-old walked into Academy Bank at 1 South Tejon Street, told a teller he had a weapon, and left with cash. Outside, witnesses said, he flung the bills behind him and shouted “Merry Christmas.” Then he sat down on the patio of the Starbucks next door and waited for the officers who already knew which door to use.

That sequence is the whole viral story, and it is also the reason the viral story is a bad one. A man who scatters stolen money and stays put is not a holiday Robin Hood. He is a suspect who turned a downtown sidewalk into a crime scene and then made himself easy to book. Bystanders did the part the memes skip. Dion Pascale, who watched it, told KKTV that Oliver came out of the branch and threw money “all over the place,” with someone from inside following him. People on the sidewalk scooped up bills and carried them back to the teller. The Christmas greeting did not make the cash a gift. It made the theft louder.

Colorado Springs police put the time at about 12:27 p.m. The blotter called the robber an older white male who threatened a weapon and left with an undisclosed amount. Sgt. Jim Jeffocat, speaking to The Denver Post, would not confirm the shout or the scattering. He would confirm two harder facts. Officers found no gun on Oliver. Thousands of dollars were still missing after the sidewalk collection. Lt. Cari Graves told The Gazette the next day that the search for the rest of the cash was not finished, and she would not put a number on the gap. The Starbucks manager told the Post that Oliver never ordered anything. Nobody at the tables thought the white beard was a story until the patrol cars filled the curb.

Bond was set at $10,000. Oliver spent Christmas inside the El Paso County Criminal Justice Center. His first appearance was on the calendar for 1:30 p.m. on December 26, two days after the department posted the booking photo that cable shows would treat as a punchline. Academy Bank’s deposits are federally insured, which is why a downtown robbery is never only a local oddity. The arrest, though, was a Colorado Springs police arrest. The national write-ups from that week, including the wire story that moved under an Associated Press credit, stopped at the jail door. They had the beard, the bills, and the coffee shop. They did not have a sentence, because there was not one yet to print.

The sidewalk was not the end of the file

Thirteen months later the same man was on a Teller County road telling a deputy he was armed and that he was not going back to jail. On Friday, January 15, 2021, a deputy tried to stop a Ford Expedition with no license plates on Loy Creek Road, east of Woodland Park. The driver was David Oliver, now 66. He continued about a mile, stopped on Rampart Range Road, and, according to the sheriff’s office, yelled that he had a gun and was not going back. He stuck a handgun out of the driver’s window and drove off. During the short pursuit the deputy saw the gun leave the vehicle. Oliver stopped again farther up the road, then pulled away as more deputies arrived. The pursuit was called off. While deputies searched for the weapon along Forest Service Road 946, Oliver came back and surrendered.

The Gazette e KOAA both tied that driver to the Academy Bank case by name, age, and the Christmas throw. Teller County booked him on felony menacing, possession of a weapon by a previous offender, and vehicular eluding, plus a misdemeanor driving-under-the-influence charge. The previous-offender gun count is the line in the charging list that the 2019 meme never had room for. A man who threatened a weapon inside a bank, and who had no gun when he was searched at the coffee shop, was later accused of displaying one from a moving SUV and then throwing it into the woods. The holiday script does not survive that second afternoon.

The sheriff’s office labeled him, in its own post, the “Merry Christmas Bank Robber.” That nickname is the problem. It freezes a felony at the moment it was most shareable and ignores the part where the same person, a year on, allegedly told a deputy the jail was the thing he would not accept. Newsrooms that updated the item in later years still described the arrest. They did not, in the pieces that stayed online, publish a judgment, a plea, or a prison term for either the Tejon Street robbery or the Rampart Range pursuit. The absence is the reporting, not a rumor about a secret dismissal. A case can be real, booked, and still fail to produce the neat ending a year-end roundup wants. Oliver’s did that twice.

What the cash on the sidewalk actually was

Pascale’s account is the one worth keeping, because it is specific and because it contradicts the generosity myth. He did not describe a man pressing bills into strangers’ hands. He described money thrown, a person from the bank coming out after it, and passersby picking the bills up and giving them back. Jeffocat’s refusal to narrate the shout is also worth keeping. Police spokesmen decline colorful details when they expect those details to be litigated. The witnesses were not on the stand that week. The teller was. A threat of a weapon, even when no weapon is later found, is what turns a theft from a drawer into a robbery. Colorado’s aggravated-robbery statutes treat a simulated weapon as part of the terror, not as a technicality that vanishes when the pocket is empty. Federal bank-robbery law does the same thing with intimidation. Oliver was not charged in the newspaper. He was jailed on the police allegation, which is a different stage, and it is the stage the public record still clearly shows.

Other Colorado holdups show what a finished bank case looks like when the ending makes the headline. In 2025 an armored-car crew tied to the Colorado Springs area was ordered to repay more than $180,000 taken from a Brinks bag, with prison terms measured in years. A Castle Rock defendant who fired into the floor of an Independent Bank branch drew a 22-year term after a plea to aggravated robbery. Those files moved because the evidence was a gun, a sum, and a getaway. Oliver’s file moved into the culture because the evidence included four syllables nobody could resist quoting. A disposition is a docket number. The syllables won.

Oliver’s second arrest is the fact that should have replaced the meme and never quite did. A previous-offender weapons allegation means a court, somewhere, had already treated him as a person who was not supposed to have a gun. The 2019 search found none. The 2021 pursuit, if the sheriff’s account holds, found one in his hand and then in the trees off a forest road. Between those two searches is the only character development the public record offers, and it runs in the opposite direction from redemption. He did not become the man who gave the money away. He became, on the sheriff’s telling, the man who would rather show a pistol than go back inside.

Readers looking for the rest of the odd-crime file can start with the Florida arrest, the same week, of a man who handed out marijuana because it was Christmas, and with the later Florida case of a thief who swallowed high-end earrings rather than give them back. Neither of those men got to be a folk hero either, which is the correct outcome. The category that actually fits is not a punchline vertical. It is Crimine News, beside U.S. News, where a bank’s missing thousands still count after the holiday graphics come down.

What remains, after the beard and the patio, is a narrow set of sourced facts. A 65-year-old threatened a teller at Academy Bank, left with cash, was seen throwing at least some of it, and was arrested without a weapon at the coffee shop next door, with thousands still unaccounted for and a $10,000 bond. Thirteen months later a 66-year-old of the same name, identified by local news as that robber, surrendered in Teller County after a deputy said he displayed a gun, fled, and tossed it. The judgment that would tell the public which of those allegations a court believed is not in the stories that made him famous. The AEGIS Alliance will keep the booking, the witness, the missing cash, and the second chase. The cartoon can stay on the platforms that needed a Christmas ending more than they needed a docket.