You go to rob a bank and you meticulously case the joint to ensure that there are no police in the vicinity to obstruct your quick cash caper. The coast is clear, you rob the bank and you hightail it outta there. Everything is going exactly as planned up until there’s a massive man running you down. This was the unforeseen monkey wrench in Michael Jon Neubecker’s attempted bank robbery.
On Friday afternoon, Neubecker passed a note to the teller demanding cash and walked out the door of a bank near Tampa Bay, Florida with a large sum of money. Mixed martial arts fighter Eric Haritakis also went to the Grow Financial Credit Union to drop off money for his health food delivery business Zen Body Foods. When he heard the teller scream that there had just been a robbery, Haritakis sprinted out the door to catch the culprit.
Haritakis, who goes by the nickname “Ginja Ninja,” ran down the 31-year-old criminal. He asked a nearby UPS Store if they had zip-ties, but they did not, so he hog-tied the man’s limbs with industrial tape.
“The teller was empty. She yelled to the other woman across the bank, ‘Hey, that guy just robbed me’…and I just kind of ran out of the door. I don’t really know what I was thinking at that time. I just kind of went for it. I figured if he had a weapon, he probably would have pulled it out at that point,” Haritakas said.
Security camera footage captured some of the heroic actions by the MMA fighter.
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri was grateful for the bravery by Haritakis, but warned of the dangers of crime-fighting. “You can be trained all you want with your hands, but hands don’t stop bullets,” Gualtieri said, “If this guy had a gun as you know he’s robbing a bank, MMA or, you know, Hulk Hogan — it really doesn’t make a difference.”
Haritakis had these inspiring words, “If we stand up as a group and more people are working together to make other people not do what they’re doing, then we’d be a lot better off and it would be a much better community.”
Neubecker is charged with attempted unarmed robbery.
While Haritakis is undefeated in foiling bank robberies, he’s actually 0-2 as a professional fighter and hasn’t fought since 2009.
See, not everything is terrible in Florida.
[NYDN]