AURORA | Bank robbery was Christian Paetsch’s answer to domestic troubles.
Even now, seven months after he donned a beekeeper mask, waved a pistol and bolted with $25,000 from a Wells Fargo bank in Aurora, the 46-year-old violinist and former music teacher can’t explain his bizarre reaction to a troubled family life.
“I don’t know, something broke in me,” Paetsch told a federal judge last week as he pleaded guilty to bank robbery and using a firearm during a crime.
At his sentencing in April, Paetsch, who has no criminal record, is facing close to 10 years in federal prison.
The June 2 robbery at the bank near East Hampden Avenue and South Chambers Road gained national attention after Aurora police stopped at least 25 vehicles at an intersection and held them at gunpoint for almost an hour during their search for the robber. Eventually, a tracking device hidden in the stacks of cash lead investigators to Paetsch. In his car, cops found the beekeeper mask, gun and money from the bank.
The case was also peculiar because Paetsch hardly fits the mold of a typical bank robber. An accomplished violinist from a well-known Colorado music family, he taught music at area schools for more than a decade and loved figure skating.
Paetsch’s lawyer, federal public defender Matthew Belcher, had hoped a judge would rule the police stop unconstitutional and toss the evidence found in Paetsch’s car. But last fall, U.S. District Court Judge William J. Martinez ruled against Paetsch and said the police stop, while certainly extraordinary, appeared necessary considering the violent nature of the robbery.
“The Court declines to second-guess the officers’ decision to stop the twenty vehicles when they did,” he wrote.
With that, Paetsch’s only option was taking the case to trial, where prosecutors armed with a mountain of evidence would have breezed toward conviction.
At a hearing last week inside the Alfred A. Arraj federal courthouse in Denver, Paetsch changed his plea to guilty. The plea is part of an agreement with prosecutors that allows Paetsch to continue appealing Martinez’s ruling on the traffic stop.
Still, the plea came with a hefty price: Paetsch pleaded guilty to using a gun during a crime of violence, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of seven years in federal prison. And by law, that sentence has to run consecutively to any other sentence, meaning it won’t start until Paetsch’s bank robbery sentence, which will run at least 21 months, is complete.
Before he accepted the plea, Martinez had Paetsch explain what he did and why.
Paetsch, who has been free on bond since a few days after his arrest, said he was going through a difficult stretch in his family life and having problems with his wife and 19-year-old daughter.
“I wasn’t sure how to handle them at the time,” he said.
Paetsch didn’t specify what his problems were, but federal prosecutors have said he appeared to have financial troubles. The day before the robbery, prosecutors said Paetsch and his wife went to the Wells Fargo bank in an effort to renegotiate a loan. When the bank refused, Paetsch’s wife stormed out in tears.
“In a state of despair, I went into a bank and took some money out of the bank and left,” Paetsch said.
He stressed that he didn’t want to hurt anyone and made sure the gun didn’t have a round in the chamber and that the safety was on.
“Even to this day, I can’t imagine why I did this,” he said.