A Lansdale man who tried to shoot a Pa. State Police trooper after a bank robbery will serve 25 years in prison
Christopher Larue had pointed a .32-caliber pistol at a trooper who confronted him over the robbery. He pulled the trigger, only for the gun to jam and not fire.
A Lansdale man who tried to shoot a Pennsylvania State Police trooper shortly after robbing a Perkasie bank has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
Christopher Larue, now 44, had been taken into custody in October 2020 after he pointed a .32-caliber pistol at a trooper who’d confronted him over the robbery. Larue pulled the trigger, only for the gun to jam and not fire.
“Do you want to f—ing die today?” Larue screamed at Trooper Thomas Yates while trying to shoot him, according to court documents. Yates was ultimately able to grab control of Larue and place him in handcuffs.
Initially charged by Bucks County prosecutors with crimes including attempted second-degree murder, aggravated assault, and robbery, Larue pleaded guilty in federal court last October to one count of brandishing a firearm during a violent crime and one count of armed bank robbery, authorities said. Court documents say he stole $11,000 from a QNB Bank in Perkasie on Oct. 19, 2020, and police were quickly able to identify him as a suspect because a GPS tracking device was hidden with the money he stole.
Larue drove with that tracking device to a construction site where he was working in Conshohocken. When the trooper arrived to question him, Larue threatened Yates.
In court documents, an attorney for Larue — convicted of at least five bank robberies before this one — said he’d long suffered from depression and had attempted suicide several times during his life. The attorney, Brian Zeiger, wrote that Larue’s threatening of Yates represented another suicide attempt — that he’d pulled the gun in part because he wanted Yates to shoot him.
Still, Zeiger wrote that Larue “accepts full responsibility for all of the conduct related to this offense and conviction.”
U.S. District Court Judge Gene E.K. Pratter imposed Larue’s sentence Wednesday.
U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams noted in a statement that the proceeding came during a week in which two state troopers were fatally struck by an accused drunk driver on I-95 in South Philadelphia.
She said Larue “acted with complete disregard and callousness” for the lives of the troopers and bank employees.
“But for a misfired gun, the outcome could have been yet another tragic loss of life,” Arbittier Williams said.