Hunt is on for familiar suspect

Authorities are searching for a man they believe robbed a bank on Thursday.

By THOMAS LAKE, Times Staff Writer
Published October 19, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT Kenneth Benzo, released from jail Wednesday, is wanted in a Thursday robbery.

HOLIDAY - A man in jeans and a Miami Hurricanes T-shirt walked into the Crown Bank on Mile Stretch Road Thursday morning, handed the teller a note and headed west with the cash, an undisclosed amount, as usual, and the authorities said he was Kenneth Wayne Benzo, 47, for whom it has been an eventful week: he got out of jail Wednesday afternoon, after going there Tuesday afternoon, which he did because of another bank robbery.

See, around noon that day, someone walked into the Wachovia at 8994 State Road 52 and handed the teller a note and got away with you guessed it an undisclosed sum.

A little while later, a deputy saw Benzo nearby and noticed he fit the suspect description, and to this day he is a suspect in that case, though he hasn't been charged in that case because the teller couldn't ID him.

Anyway, he was arrested Tuesday on a different charge, one from two years ago, because when the deputy had him in custody for the bank robbery it reminded a detective that he could charge him with a burglary, from 2005, during which someone broke into a widow's house and stole a diamond ring and cut himself on the glass and left blood in the house and it was tested for DNA and eventually the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said that DNA matched Benzo's, but the detective could have arrested him on that charge months earlier if he had only looked for him in the county jail, where Benzo had been for more than a year on yet another charge, and where, if deputies find him, he will return.

Times researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to this report. Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245.

[Last modified October 18, 2007, 23:44:50]