The Social Sciences

"This is a bomb threat. I need you to take all the money and bring it behind The Beer Store. I can see everything you are doing. You have five minutes."
Female accomplice of Brandon Dawson-Jarvis

The Ottawa Courthouse on Elgin St. (Ottawa Sun file photo)

Studies in the social sciences presumably offers students a fairly authentic view of human activities, human nature, culture, precedents and social mores in practise on a broad scale. It's fair enough to imagine that a young man in his early twenties attending the University of Ottawa to complete an honours degree in social sciences has a fairly good idea of how human nature meshes with society's legal constraints on unlawful activities.

Perhaps this particular young man, saw his academic work and the degree to which he was aspiring in conflict with his inclination to display anti-social tendencies. Perhaps he saw a challenge to respond to, using his knowledge of the social sciences to abuse public trust in the veneer of an honest, hard-working and ambitious young man. In any event, completed degree in hand, at age 26, he is now set to serve three and a half years in prison.

In the wake of his preliminary hearing, Brandon Dawson-Jarvis pleaded guilty to robbery, attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud over $5,000. The young man, conscientious in his university studies, and working in an Ottawa bank was found to have $53,540.84 in his personal bank account. And that personal account will now be depleted, handed over to the bank that he and his cohorts had robbed when he was 22.

The young man persuaded his then-girlfrield and another woman to consider how they might benefit from conspiring to rob the bank where he was employed.  They were to arrive at the bank before closing time, during his shift on February 6, 2009. The women entered the bank wearing masks and then proceeded to hand the only employee behind a service wicket, a note. The thing of it is, they handed a note that Brandon Dawson-Jarvis had written, to Brandon Dawson-Jarvis himself. As planned.

The note was brief and to the point. The kind of note that has been written countless times before. It is a phrase that has been used and re-used to the point of intense familiarity to anyone who has ever read a book or viewed a film featuring a bank robbery. It is concise and having ingested its message, nothing more need be said: "Do as I say and no one will get hurt", it began....

Unbeknownst to Brandon Dawson-Jarvis, the two women whom he had recruited brought along knives and duct tape. They led his two co-workers to a washroom where they were bound at the wrists and ankles with the duct tape, their heads covered with bandanas. Whereupon the remaining bank teller made haste to respond to the demands of the two female hold-up artists.

Enabling the woman to depart the bank with a satchel full of cash, some $126,000 in total. That total was later divided among the three and over a period of seven months the cash was placed in a series of bank deposits and transfers benefiting themselves. And then Mr. Dawson-Jarvis hatched another brilliant idea.

He was the individual at the bank in charge of the secure area when a woman telephoned threatening the assistant manager. "This is a bomb threat. I need you to take all the money and bring it behind The Beer Store. I can see everything you are doing. You have five minutes." 

Whereupon Mr. Dawson-Jarvis conveyed his sense of excited urgency to his co-workers, expressing his conviction that they had little option but to follow orders or they would all become victims of an explosion.

He must have been dreadfully disappointed when they decided instead to call 911 and the plot just fell flat. So much for his insider knowledge of human relations and interactions. But he wasn't finished at the bank. Still working there, he attempted another gambit, convincing another man to aid him in defrauding the bank of $6,300. That attempt too, failed.

One might reach the conclusion that at a fairly early age a young man with a great deal of potential in having sought out an academic degree, and having established himself as a reliable, dependable employee would seek to short-cut the usual routine in working hard to develop a good reputation and a career that might lead to any other avenues of fulfillment chose instead to shortchange himself.