Police investigate alarm at downtown bank

MASON CITY – Police were called to a downtown Mason City bank that has already been robbed at least once in the past after an alarm went off.

The incident took place Friday, May 19, at First Citizens Bank, located at 33 East State Street in downtown Mason City. The incident did not make the police blotter, but Mason City police confirm that the bank “did have an alarm call around 10 pm that night”.

The alarm rang at 9:58 PM, and officers arrived to investigate. There was a police van in the parking lot and another police car soon arrived at the scene. A witness told NIT that she saw “two men walk up to the police officer. A tall man wearing a hat and a beige top coat who was talking to an officer. Another man was with him there, too, with the tall man, carrying  a glass bowl of flowers.”

While obtaining additional information for this story, NIT received a phone call  about the incident. This witness was standing nearby and claimed to have just come out of a nearby beer hall; commenting on the condition of anonymity, he claimed he “saw it all go down, from the time the cops arrived.” When asked about the two gentlemen who spoke with police at the scene, the witness told NIT it appeared that the two men were Mason City banker O. Jay Tomson and conservative political writer Todd Blodgett.

“I recognized Tomson and Blodgett,” the caller told NIT. “It looked like they were just strolling along when they happened upon this. After they spoke to the cops, they got in a car and took off.  Tomson drove, turned west, on State street. The police were still there when those guys left.”

Mr. Tomson owns First Citizens Bank.  He has been its Chief Executive Officer since 1974 and serves as Chairman of its Board of Directors.  The bank has upwards of a billion dollars in deposits and has branches elsewhere in Iowa and Minnesota.

Police remained on the scene and tell NIT this morning that the bank was secure.

This particular bank branch made the news back in 2012, when two tricky thieves conned cops into a wild goose chase using fake police calls and a bomb threat to Newman School to draw officers away so they could rob the place. Allen Mark Penhollow, now 37, remains incarcerated in a state prison in Rockwell City, Iowa for robbing this bank in February of 2012. His accomplice, Emily Elizabeth Francis, did only about a year of prison time for her part in the crime and has been free since 2013, although she has had numerous brushes with the law that landed her back in the local jail.