Scientist Turned Serial CU Robber Faces October Sentencing

Karl Doron, a former brain research scientist and a U.S. Marine infantry squad leader, will be sentenced in October after he pleaded guilty on Monday to multiple robbery and attempted robbery charges involving several California credit union branches, according to the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office.

After Doron, 45, robbed six credit union branches from the end of December 2018 through late February 2019, a federal and police investigation placed him under surveillance.

Finally, when he walked out of the Navy Federal Credit Union branch on Mira Mesa Boulevard in San Diego with $5,000 in a bag on March 5, Doron was immediately apprehended. Even though he was arrested without incident, he was carrying a loaded weapon.

He committed his first robbery in the late afternoon of Dec. 28, 2018, at Mission Federal Credit Union’s Clairemont Mesa Boulevard branch in San Diego. A month later on Jan. 25, he hit California Coast Credit Union’s Genesee Avenue branch in San Diego.

Then on Feb. 7, 2019, after he robbed the $8.1 billion San Diego County Credit Union’s Bernardo Plaza Drive branch in San Diego, the FBI issued a media release asking the public to help investigators identify the suspect.

On Feb. 9, two days after the FBI’s call for public assistance, Doron cased Mission Fed’s Spring Canyon Road branch at 10:30 a.m. but decided to rob the credit union’s Clairmont Mesa Boulevard branch in San Diego instead at 11:02 a.m., according to the FBI.

On Feb. 15, the FBI reported Doron cased the Eastlake Parkway branch in Chula Vista of California Coast CU at 3:53 a.m., but on the next day, he robbed Mission Fed’s Spring Canyon Road branch in San Diego, and on Feb. 23, Doron robbed the Eastlake Parkway branch of California Coast CU in Chula Vista, which he initially cased on Feb. 15.

In every robbery, Doron approached a teller station and handed the credit union employee a note demanding money.

He stole between $1,000 to $5,000 in every robbery, which amounted to a total of $10,000 to $15,000 total, according to a local media report confirmed by the DA’s office.

Doran of San Diego received a PhD in psychological and brain sciences from the University of California in Santa Barbara, conducted real-time brain-machine interface experiments funded by the National Institutes of Health and served as an infantry squad leader in the U.S. Marine Corp.

According to his LinkedIn page, Doron was a data scientist with more than 10 years of experience working with large, complex datasets in fast-paced, federally-funded academic research environments. He’s also listed on Google’s scholar site with nearly 20 academic research papers to his credit, including one that offered perspectives on examining the architecture and function of the human brain and was published by the MIT Press in 2008.

However, according to prosecutors, Doran was unemployed when he committed the crimes.