This summer, Richard James Verone, a 59-year-old man in Gastonia, North Carolina, walked into a bank, passed a teller a note indicating that he was committing robbery, and demanded cash. Strangely, it wasn’t very much cash. He asked the teller for $1. Then he told her that he’d wait, unarmed, on the sofa in the lobby for the police to arrive.
Verone, who was unemployed, had a growth on his chest and ruptured disks in his back, but he had been unable to obtain health insurance. He wasn’t holding up the bank for the money. Rather, he sought free medical attention in prison.
