The FBI, frustrated at its inability to find a Wells Fargo guard charged with a $2.5 million armored car robbery, is considering turning to the public for help.The agency has had no leads on the whereabouts of Jared Layne Gray, 26, since a witness reported seeing him abandon his pickup at a truck stop outside Brigham City and drive off in another pickup shortly after the May 5 robbery, FBI Agent Cal Clegg said Thursday.
Since then, the FBI has issued bulletins to police agencies nationwide and maintained close contact with Gray's family in Murray, whom the suspect contacted the day of the robbery.
But Clegg said if the case continues to languish without developments, agents may compile and release an FBI "profile" of Gray or dramatize the robbery on one of several crime-solving programs aired nationally.
"When we get to that point it means we've exhausted all our good leads," Clegg said. "It's not something we want to forget about. Definitely, we have to keep it stirred because at this point it would appear that any break would have to come from the public."
Gray, who with two other guards had been driving the truck from Boise to the Federal Reserve Bank branch in Salt Lake City, was charged with theft by an agent of the Federal Reserve Bank, theft of bank funds and theft from an interstate shipment.
Guards Scott Redford and Dale Neilson were asleep in a bunk compartment when the vehicle stopped at a gas station on I-15 in Box Elder County.
Redford told investigators he was awakened by the sound of someone in the truck's money compartment. When he and Neilson tried to get out to check, they found the truck's door had been jammed shut from outside.
Clegg said authorities initially believed the crime was spontaneous.
"But now we know that the Chevy Luv truck had been left off at a certain site at least a couple days before he was taking this trip. So there was quite a bit of meditation put into it, we think now, especially since we can't find him," he said.
The crime has mystified relatives of Gray, a loner who is unmarried but had a girlfriend until about a year ago, Clegg said.
"They're embarrassed about it," the agent said. "He (Gray) has no criminal background whatsoever. That's how he got his job as a guard. They just don't know what would've prompted him to have done something like this."
Clegg said Gray likely has fled Utah, although the FBI has received no information about reported sightings of the suspect or his vehicle in other states.
"We haven't found it abandoned. We just haven't come up with it at all. It's probably at the bottom of a lake somewhere," he said.