Sad state of affairs. Man robs bank to get medical help.

Too young for free health care, and too poor to pay for it himself, James Verone, a former shopkeeper from North Carolina, had begun to despair of ever finding treatment for his various ailments.
Then he had what he regards as his Eureka moment. In his home state there was an organisation that offered free medical attention, a bed and regular meals: a place where he would be kept under constant supervision. The name of this place was prison.

All that was required for a lengthy stay in this heathcare utopia was that he commit a crime. So Mr Verone, 59, set off to rob a bank of $1.
“I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic,” he told reporters from Gaston County Jail, where he has already enjoyed two check-ups with a prison nurses and will see a doctor on Friday.
Verone’s logic first suggested a foray into criminality earlier this summer.

After a seventeen-year career working for Coca-Cola, he found employment as a truck driver and then as a convenience store clerk, but found it hard to hold down the job.
He walked with a limp, he suffered arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome, and he had two ruptured discs in his back. Then he discovered a strange protrusion in his chest.

“The pain was beyond the tolerance that I could accept,” he told his local paper, the Gaston Gazette. He tried to file for disability benefits, but qualified only for food stamps.
That was when he concluded that crime might pay, after all, at least in the form of back and foot surgery. He would suffer some injury to his reputation after a lifetime as a law-abiding citizen, but this would be more than outweighed by being able to put weight on both feet again, and by being able to bend down and reach things on low shelves.

He sold his furniture, paid his final month’s rent and moved into a hotel. On June 9 he showered, ironed his shirt, and caught a taxi to downtown Gastonia.
He posted a letter to his local paper. “By the time you read this a bank robbery will have been committed by me,” it said. “I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”

At the RBC Bank Verone handed a bank clerk a note, warning that he was armed and demanding that she hand over a dollar. Then he immediately surrendered. “I say, ‘I’ll be sitting right over here on the chair, waiting for the police’,” he said.
The bank employee called the police and said that the outlaw could be apprehended “sitting on the sofa as you walk in the front door”. Police found him there, unarmed.

He will appear in court on June 28, where he is hoping to receive a sentence of several years: time to undergo treatment and recover in state-funded accommodation.
His only concern is that he was not charged with robbery but with larceny, which carries a lesser sentence.
Now Verone is considering issuing a warning to the court that if his sentence is too lenient, he may reoffend. If he feels up to it.