Grand jury indicts Tupelo bank robbery suspect
Jun. 22—TUPELO — A man who has robbed at least 10 banks since 2002 has been indicted for robbing a downtown Tupelo bank in April.
Last week, a federal grand jury handed down the true bill charging Jasper Michael Wagner, 56, of Tupelo, with taking $5,000 during the April 6 robbery of the Community Bank at 307 West Main Street. He was captured in Alabama hours later.
Wagner is in federal custody in the Lafayette County Detention Center in Oxford. He will be arraigned via video Friday morning in U.S. District Court before Magistrate Judge Jane Virden in Greenville.
A career criminal who has spent two separate stints in federal prisons for bank robbery, Wagner could face up to 20 years on the new charge.
Wagner was released from a federal prison in late 2021 after serving most of a nearly 11-year sentence for robbing three banks in three different states in a one-week period in December 2010. As part of the supervised release — commonly called probation — he was told he could not break the law or leave the area for five years.
Roughly four months after his release, he is accused of entering the Community Bank branch on West Main Street on April 6 and handing the clerk a note telling her to give him $5,000. Court documents say he walked out of the bank with around that amount in a bank bag. When he was apprehended in a Leeds, Alabama, hotel room about four hours later, he still had the bank bag and most of the money.
In a separate matter, prosecutors are still looking to revoke the remainder of his supervised release. That would force him to return to a federal prison to serve the remainder of his probation while waiting for the trial on the new charge.
Since 2002, Wagner has pleaded guilty in federal court to 10 bank robberies in seven states, from New Mexico to the Carolinas, including two in Mississippi.
The first documented string of Wagner's bank robberies began in late 2000 and included banks in New Mexico, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and two in South Carolina. He pleaded guilty to robbing seven banks and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $59,048 in restitution.
Following his release in early 2010, Wagner stole a car in December 2010 and robbed banks in Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. He pleaded guilty to those crimes in a Mississippi courtroom. In June 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mills sentenced him to 130 months in prison, plus five years of supervised release.
