Quincy Homere sentenced to 18 years in prison for Hempstead bank robbery

A Hempstead man who tied up Wells Fargo bank branch employees and patrons — including an elderly woman and an 8-year-old boy — during a 2015 armed bank heist was sentenced Friday to 18 years in federal prison.

Quincy Homere, 38, admitted to donning a black ski mask and storming into the Fulton Avenue branch in Hempstead around 6 p.m. on Nov. 9, 2015, waving an AK-47 with two other men, leaping over the counter and forcing the employees to the back of the building where the vault was located.

He and the others held bankgoers and employees hostage, zip-tying them. The robbers cleaned out the vault, briefly netting more than $375,000, authorities said.

One of the bank tellers had the presence of mind to stick a GPS tracker with the loot so police could track the robbers, prosecutors said.

The suspects drove their BMW getaway car the wrong way on the Southern State Parkway to avoid a police blockade, but within 16 minutes of the robbery, they abandoned the car on an off-ramp, leaving their masks and most of the money behind, authorities said.

Homere fled to Florida, where he remained on the lam until November 2016, when Nassau police and the FBI nabbed him in Miami. He was extradited to Long Island.

DNA taken off one of the masks left in the car was traced back to Homere, whose genetic material had been cataloged before from one of his previous run-ins with the law, according to authorities.

He pleaded guilty in 2017 and it’s unclear why his sentencing took seven years. 

His lawyer, Gary Schoer, declined to comment.

In addition to the bank robbery, Homere is charged with the drive-by murder of Queens rapper Lionel Pickens, 31, who went by the stage name Chinx. Pickens was gunned down in May 2015, according to prosecutors. That case is still pending.

In a letter to Long Island federal Judge Gary Brown ahead of the sentencing, Homere said a traumatic child experience led him to a life of crime.

He also apologized for the pain he caused the bank patrons that day.

“Before anything, I must apologize to the victims of my cynical and dangerous actions. I’m forever haunted by the face of the people that I terrorized that day in the bank,” Homere wrote. “Once I started planning to commit a crime, I became a stone-cold loser.”