Colorado babysitter held in drive-through bank robbery with kids in car

By Keith Coffman

DENVER (Reuters) - A Colorado babysitter has been arrested on suspicion of robbing a drive-through bank by falsely claiming that a man in her car threatened to harm the two children in her care unless given money, police said on Monday.

Rachel Einspahr, 28, is suspected of robbery and two counts of child abuse in connection with Friday's incident in the town of Severance, about 55 miles north of Denver, the Weld County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

Police said Einspahr went to the Colorado East Bank & Trust drive-through and sent a note to the teller through the vacuum tube saying the man would harm her children unless she gave him money.

"The bank teller, under the assumption that lives were in danger, gave her $500," the police statement said.

Einspahr was arrested in minutes in a nearby neighborhood after police got a vehicle description and blocked off the area, sheriff's spokesman Corporal Matthew Turner said in a phone interview on Monday.

Investigators determined that no man was involved and that Einspahr was not the children's mother but their babysitter, Turner said. The two children were not harmed, he said.

Einspahr was held on a $40,000 cash-only bond and is set to be formally charged on Wednesday, jail records showed.

Einspahr could not be immediately reached for comment.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman in Denver; Editing by Curtis Skinner and Richard Chang)