Trinity graduate due home after US robbery jail term

A one-time high-achieving Trinity College graduate is finally to return home, nearly 10 years after he was caught following a dramatic and reckless armed robbery of a bank in the United States.

Prize-winning computer science graduate Niall Clarke will be released next week from federal prison, then immediately deported back to Ireland.

Clarke, 34, from Clare, made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic following the 2006 armed robbery of a bank in Bangor, Maine.

It was a disaster. After holding up a teller and fleeing with $11,000 (€9,769), Clark was spotted by a police officer, tailed and arrested within minutes.

Those minutes of madness cost him nearly 10 years of his life.

Details soon emerged of his background; prizes at Trinity; his expertise with computers; his huge potential; but also a troubling history of mental illness, largely untreated schizophrenia, according to testimony given by his father at a sentencing hearing.

Clarke pleaded guilty to armed robbery and to brandishing a firearm at employees of the bank. He received 33 months for the robbery and a mandatory minimum of seven years for the use of the gun.

He is currently being held in a federal prison in Rochester, Minnesota but public records reveal he is due to be released on June 22. Sources said he will be released then and deported immediately.

It had been thought Clarke might have been transferred to serve some of his time in prison in Ireland as the judge who sentenced him raised no objections.

But that would only have happened if Clarke, from Kilrush, had applied and agreed to a transfer.

Although in the US on a temporary visa that was about to run out, he managed to acquire a gun using a driving licence as identification, obtained with the help of the head of a division of Maine’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

The pair had met in a bar in Boston on St Patrick’s Day, 2006.

On October 4 that year Clarke, his head covered in a ski mask, entered the bank in downtown Bangor and demanded tellers fill a bag with cash.

He shouted at employees and threatened the manager as she picked up a phone.

Teller Cheri Smith told a sentencing hearing: “I think to myself, please don’t shoot me.

“I have kids at home. I just want to go home and be with them.”

Clarke fled but bank staff managed to take down his car registration number and the alarm was raised. A detective spotted the vehicle and followed him to a highway, where half a dozen state police cars were waiting.

His father Michael, who in court testimony described how his own mother suffered from schizophrenia, said he tried to have his son committed for treatment in Ireland. But Clarke refused and as he was not deemed a danger to himself or others, was never committed.

The family’s lawyer, Eugene O’Kelly, said after the sentencing: “What makes this so sad is that it could have been prevented. In a few short years, Niall’s gone from college to criminal, from prodigy to prison.”