Cornwall bank robbery One family's trials

SHARON —It’s not hard to figure out which house on East Street Crystal Eyler grew up in. It’s one of the few remaining cottages in what has become a manicured estate section of Sharon. It’s also the house with the peeling paint, the windows that are stopped up with what looks like foil-covered styrofoam, the cars and toys and junk strewn across the yard. In the driveway, a pickup truck is loaded down with bags of laundry and garbage.

This week, Sharon’s public health officer informed the family that it must clean up its yard or face fines. The official complaint orders the Eylers to “immediately correct the condition identified as an accumulation of garbage, debris and rodent harborage on the premises, causing a public nuisance.�

It’s been a rough week for the Eyler family. Crystal, 27, has recently been in the news because of her alleged involvement in the failed robbery of a National Iron Bank branch in Cornwall last Tuesday. That robbery received a great deal of press because of the haphazard way in which it was committed and because of the absurd events that happened in its aftermath.

Crystal is currently in the women’s correctional center in Niantic, awaiting trial on charges of disorderly conduct, robbery and larceny. Her bond was set at $200,500. Her alleged partner in crime was Jason Durant, 32, of Millerton, who is in jail in the correctional center in New Haven. He is being held on $350,500 bond.

Family members chose not to bail out either of the robbers, said Jessica Eyler, 31, Crystal’s older sister. She spoke to The Journal on Monday and in an hour-long conversation barely had time to recount the entirety of the troubled history of Durant and her sister.

According to town officials and neighbors of the family, Jessica is the one who keeps the cottage on East Street functioning at all. Their mother, Rachel, is seriously overweight, so much so that her body has essentially failed her. She is disabled from the combination of her weight, her arthritis and her diabetes.

Crystal receives Social Security disability payments because of what her sister says is a mental impairment. Her 8-year-old son is autistic (Crystal is apparently on “the autism spectrum,� according to her sister, but she is less impaired than her son). The child lives in the East Street house with his aunt and grandmother. They adopted him about 6 years ago, when his father allegedly became phsyically abusive to Crystal and then to the boy himself.

Initially, Jessica said, she and her mother had joint custody of the child but as her mother became less able to care for herself, Jessica became the sole guardian of the boy.

The child is a rare bright spot in her life. Jessica speaks of him with pride, describing the advances he has made at school. He loves to draw, and is now able to read at grade level.

Durant and Eyler have not yet pled to the charges against them (their next court date is May 12). If they were driven to try and rob a bank with a BB gun,  the autistic child might have been one of the reasons. Not because the mother was trying to get money to help her son, however.

Rather, she and Durant had been told just days before the robbery that they had to move out of the East Street house. Jessica said she told them she would not tolerate smoking and abusing prescription drugs in the house while the child was there, and they would have to leave.

The pair had apparently decided to find an apartment of their own, and Jessica theorized that they might have thought that robbing the bank was a way to get some money “so they could do whatever they wanted.�

If it was Durant and Eyler who robbed the bank, it seems likely that some of the money would also have been used to buy more painkillers and more Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug that had been prescribed to Crystal. Jessica believes that Durant and her sister had taken a substantial number of Xanax pills on the morning of the robbery. It is a drug that reduces inhibitions and when taken in excess gives the user a sense of euphoria and invulnerability.

“Every time my sister has been arrested, she’s been on Xanax,� Jessica said.

The state of  Connecticut Judicial Web site shows six convictions for Crystal between 2005 and 2008, mainly for narcotics possession charges. There are also charges for driving without a license and forgery. Jessica said her sister has also been arrested in New York state several times.

Durant apparently was taking several prescription painkillers in the aftermath of a back injury at his last job, working for a fireplace company.

At the time of the robbery last week, Durant was living in the Eyler’s East Street house. Jessica said it was because he’d had a fight with his mother when he crashed her car after taking a prescription sleeping pill.

While he was living in the East Street house, he was driving a car he had rented from Sharon Imports at Autosport in Sharon. The car was used to rob the bank, and was seized by police at New Milford Hospital in the hours after the bank robbery.

There has been a great deal of speculation about why the police didn’t arrest Durant and Eyler while they were at the hospital. He had broken his ankle in three or four places; he said he had hurt it while skateboarding, but witnesses at the bank said the robber had tumbled down a slope behind the bank and then had to drag himself to the getaway car.

The police were alerted that Durant was at the hospital, and towed the rented car, but did not arrest him or Crystal.

Jessica Eyler said she was also confused initially about why the two were not arrested at the hospital. When they came to the house, they told her they’d been questioned by the state police but released. They said they hadn’t done anything wrong.

“I actually felt really badly,� Jessica said. “I thought, here I am accusing them of something just because they have a past.�

She believes now that the police did not arrest the pair at the hospital because they expected them to return to the hillside behind the bank. As the robber fell, he lost all but $2 of the $9,359 he had taken from the bank, according to the police report.

All the money (except for the $2) had been recovered earlier in the day by state police, who also found a BB gun, allegedly used by Durant to frighten the tellers at the bank during the robbery.

Durant didn’t know that the police had found the money and the gun. According to the arrest warrant, he and Eyler hitched a ride from someone at the hospital and asked the driver to stop and wait for them at the hillside so they could look for a lost shoe.  A witness called the police to report that someone with crutches was combing the hillside in the dark, with a flashlight.

Jessica said she was glad that the police waited, and that the duo went back to the scene and “cooked their own goose.� She is glad, she said, to have Crystal gone.

Now she hopes that life will return somewhat to normal in the East Street house, and that she and her boyfriend can once again turn their attention to the considerable task of cleaning their home and property, and caring for the autistic child.

Next week: The bad luck list for the Eyler family is so long that it can’t be fully included in this story. Jessica Eyler has received some assistance from the town of Sharon, but as soon as one problem is alleviated, another pops up. And there are growing tensions with the neighbors.