Wayne Rogers, spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, began his presentation to the Jefferson County Commission by acknowledging an anniversary.

Not the anniversary of his marriage and not the anniversary of his birth. No, this was the anniversary of the day that he could have been killed in a bank robbery.

Forty-five years ago, on June 3 at about 1:30 in the afternoon, Rogers was a 17-year-old teller at the Fulton Branch of the Bank of Thomasville when three males came to rob the bank.

“The young man who held the gun to my head was probably about my age,” Rogers surmised. “He was surely a drug addict from Mobile. They never caught him, but in his hand he had … He had one of these little 9 millimeters and he had his hand against my face and his hand was shaking and he had his finger on the trigger.”

Nearly a half century later, Rogers can still feel the barrel of the gun against his face when he thinks hard about the scene.

“He was just shaking,” Rogers said. “I thought, ‘This guy’s not going to kill me because he wants to but he might kill me by accident.’”

The branch manager convinced the robbers that they had gotten all the money. “Of course it was a lie,” Rogers said. “They got all the money they could get because the rest of the money was in the vault and you can’t open the vault except when the bank is closed. At least that’s the way it was in those days.”

The teen teller would eventually testify against the mastermind of the robbery when he was caught. That experience greatly impacted his life as he idolized the prosecuting attorney, Virginia Granade, who later became a federal judge in Mobile.

“She became my hero,” Rogers said. “When I met her and saw her prosecuting a case, that’s one of the big factors in me deciding to go to law school and eventually going to work at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Birmingham, which led me on my career path.

“I became a USA (U.S. attorney) like her,” he said. “It was what sort of set me on the path towards public service.”

Rogers went to the commission to present a resolution for Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputies to take part in the Alabama Department of Corrections’ Contraband Interdiction Project. In the project, deputies work overtime to monitor the area around prisons to deter the use of drones to deliver contraband for prisoners to collect.

The Department of Corrections “asked us to actually offer overtime to our folks, especially ones who work in the western part of the county,” he said. “They come and essentially patrol around Donaldson for a few hours and just make sure that nobody’s trying to get contraband over the walls of Donaldson Prison.

“This contract expands it,” Rogers said, “so that we can help DOC with prisoner transports.”