Published: June 24, 2008 11:06 pm      

Artrip gets 327 months in 2005 crimes

CINCINNATI — An Ashland man, whose jailbreak and multi-state robbery spree made national headlines and landed him on the list of the nation’s most-sought fugitives last summer, was sentenced earlier this month to more than 27 years in prison in federal court in Cincinnati.

The sentence imposed by U.S. District Judge S. Arthur Spiegel was for a pair of 2005 holdups to which Anthony “Tony” Artrip had pleaded guilty and was awaiting sentencing for when he broke out of the Grant County Detention Center in June 2007.

The 327-month sentence for the robberies of the Oak Hill Bank, now Wesbanco, branch in South Point and the Harbor National Bank in Ormond Beach, Fla., will run consecutively with a seven-year sentence that Artrip received in federal court in Kentucky for the escape in February.

Spiegel also ordered Artrip and his co-defendant, Michael Paul Myers, to pay restitution in the amount of $51,989 to the Ohio bank. Myers, of Westwood, was sentenced to 27 months in prison in the South Point robbery in September 2006.

Artrip pleaded guilty to the Ohio and Florida robberies on June 12, 2007.

Artrip escaped from the Grant County lockup, located in Williamstown, by climbing a basketball goal in the jail’s recreation area, sitting in a hand-made sling attached to a beam and kicking a hole in the chain-link fence covering the recreation yard until there was a hole large enough to slip through. He then jumped down and bolted into some nearby woods.

Following his escape, Artrip was either charged or suspected in bank heists in five states — West Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana and Georgia. During his flight from the law, he managed to elude capture several times by fleeing into wooded areas.

Artrip — who made the U.S. Marshals Service’s list of the nation’s 15 most wanted fugitives and was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” while he was on the run — was finally captured on Oct. 8 after a nearly five-hour standoff with authorities at a hotel in Pittsburgh.

At his sentencing on the escape charge, Artrip told Judge David L. Bunning that he enjoyed having the Marshals pursue him and that he was honored to have been profiled on “America’s Most Wanted.”