Charges say a Woodbury man admitted to police Monday that he recently robbed two banks in Woodbury and one in Oakdale just up the road from his workplace, telling officers he committed the heists because of mounting bills.

Zahir Mohamednazir Bachelani pulled off the robberies on three days between June 14 and Saturday — making away with just over $5,000 — before being tracked down and arrested Monday while leaving work, according to police and charges against the 38-year-old. He made a first appearance on the charges Wednesday and remained jailed in lieu of $100,000 bail, or $75,000 with conditions.

Bank surveillance video shows a person suspected of robbing two banks in Woodbury and one in Oakdale between June 14 and Aug. 3, 2024. (Courtesy of Woodbury Police Department)

Woodbury police on Monday afternoon posted on Facebook four photos from bank surveillance video and “almost immediately” received calls to its tip line identifying Bachelani as the suspect, Cmdr. Tom Ehrenberg said Wednesday.

According to Tuesday’s criminal complaint:

Woodbury police responded to Huntington Bank at 7377 Currell Blvd. about 4:30 p.m. June 14 on a report of a bank robbery in progress. A man — wearing a dark red shoulder-length wig, long black and purple dress, medical facemask, medical gloves and knee-high black boots — passed a note to a teller that read: “This is a robbery. You are going to take all of the $100 bills from your drawer and place them in an envelope. My partner is waiting outside. Once I leave, my partner will leave. Do as I say and no one will get hurt.” He made off with $700.

About two weeks later, on June 29, Oakdale police responded to U.S. Bank at 7620 10th St. N. around 11:15 a.m. for a hold-up alarm. A man wearing a medical facemask and medical gloves gave a note to a teller that read: “This is a robbery. My partner is waiting outside. Take $4,000 out of your drawer and place it in an envelope. Once I leave my partner will leave. Shake your head if you understand and no one will get hurt.” He was given $4,000 and left in a silver Hyundai Sonata.

Woodbury police were called to Wells Fargo at 7525 Currell Blvd., just west of Huntington Bank, about 9:30 a.m. Saturday. A man wearing a medical facemask and medical gloves handed over a note that read: “[T]his is a robbery. Place $6,000 in an envelope. I am armed with a gun. Do not speak. Do not say anything to anyone.” He made off with $370.

After the tip-line calls, police discovered Bachelani owned a 2015 silver Hyundai Sonata and that he worked at a medical clinic just up Helmo Avenue from the U.S. Bank. Officers saw him leaving work around 5 p.m. and arrested him. He was wearing blue Under Armour shoes that matched those the robber wore during Monday’s robbery.

A search of his home turned up a dark red wig and clothing also seen in bank video, including the black and purple dress, according to police.

Zahir Mohamednazir Bachelani (Courtesy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)

Bachelani told police in an interview he carried out the robberies due to financial troubles from medical bills, the complaint says.

A search of Minnesota court records shows Bachelani does not have a criminal history. Civil filings, however, show he was ordered in housing court to pay an Eden Prairie apartment building owner nearly $5,400 in missed rent payments in July 2023 and a Woodbury apartment building owner more than $3,700 on June 11, three days before the first robbery.

Bachelani faces second-degree aggravated robbery and two counts of simple robbery. He’s scheduled to be back in Washington County District Court on Aug. 29.

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Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, defended on Wednesday a false claim the former president made about Vice President Kamala Harris ‘ racial identity, suggesting wrongly that Harris had downplayed her Black heritage in trying to suggest she’s inauthentic.

“What I took it as was an attack on Kamala Harris being a chameleon,” he told reporters when asked in Michigan about the former president’s suggestion that Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, had only recently identified as Black.

“I think he was observing the basic foundational reality that Kamala Harris pretends to be something different depending on what audience she’s speaking to,” Vance said. “She fakes who she is depending on the audience she’s in front of, and that’s who she is and that’s who she’s always been.”

Vance’s was the most recent of the Republican criticisms of how Harris portrays herself, in the wake of Trump’s comments last week to the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, a high-profile Trump surrogate who is a Black man, echoed the claim on Sunday as a guest on ABC’s “This Week.”

The proliferation of Trump’s falsehood by other Republicans is part of their effort to stay in his favor, said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.

“It’s ‘I’ll do anything and I don’t want to be on the wrong side of you,’” said Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor who was the first Black man to lead the RNC. “It’s ‘I don’t want to take the heat that comes with calling out your racism, that comes with calling out your ugliness, so I will pretend that’s not what it is’.”

The Harris campaign has declined to comment specifically on Trump’s false claim. The vice president, speaking to a Black sorority last week, accused Trump of “the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect.”

Harris has frequently talked about being Black in addition to being Indian American during her political career. She was the first African American to serve as California attorney general and became the first Indian American to serve as a U.S. senator and the second Black woman, after Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois.

As an undergraduate, Harris attended Howard University, one of the nation’s most prominent historically Black colleges and universities, where she also pledged the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.

As San Francisco’s first Black district attorney, she was recognized as a “Woman of Power” by the National Urban League and received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the National Black Prosecutors Association in 2005.

She was recognized in India Abroad during her 2010 campaign for California attorney general as being potentially “the first African American as well as the first Indian-American” to hold the office.

Harris identified as both Black and Indian in an Associated Press story published that same year about the number of candidates of Indian descent running for prominent offices that year.

“I grew up in a family where I had a strong sense of my culture and who I am, and I never felt insecure about that at all,” she said at the time. “Slowly, perhaps, with each of us taking on more prominent positions, people will start to understand the diversity of the people.”

Harris joined the Congressional Black Caucus when she entered the Senate in 2017. And writing about her time at Howard in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris wrote: “Every signal told students that we could be anything — that we were young, gifted, and black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success. The campus was a place where you didn’t have to be confined to the box of another person’s choosing.”

The echo of Trump’s claim comes as the Republican nominee has tried to cut into Harris’ fundraising and media attention following her taking over President Joe Biden’s campaign after the president quit the race. Some Republican strategists have criticized Trump for making personal attacks that echo his past questioning of President Barack Obama’s citizenship, instead of pivoting to issues like the economy or immigration.

Vance previously hit Harris for using what he called a “fake Southern accent” when she campaigned in Atlanta last week. And Michaelah Montgomery, a Black conservative activist who organized a widely shared Trump meet-and-greet with local college students at an Atlanta Chick-fil-A, tore into Harris at the former president’s rally on Saturday, suggesting of Harris, “She’s only Black when it’s time to get elected.”

Rashawn Ray, a national scholar on racial and social inequity and vice president at American Institutes for Research, said the criticism willfully ignores the growing number of people who identify as multiracial.

“People can be both Black and Asian,” Ray said.

Casting doubt on Harris’ identification as Black is also an effort to use race to undermine her qualification to be president — as Trump did questioning Obama’s citizenship — said Ray.

“Some people believe that by attacking the authenticity of Vice President Harris’ Blackness, they can send a dog whistle that questions her Americanness and electability,” Ray said. “People are often judged by what they look like rather than what they represent. Some people are banking on the shallowness of this perspective.”

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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.

By JOSH FUNK

The Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a 2023 state law that restores voting rights for felons once they have completed their prison sentences.

The new law was popular with Democrats in the state, including Gov. Tim Walz, who signed it and who is Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in the presidential race. The timing of the decision is important because early voting for next week’s primary election is already underway. Voting for the Nov. 5 general election begins Sept. 20.

The court rejected a challenge from the conservative Minnesota Voters Alliance. A lower court judge had previously thrown out the group’s lawsuit after deciding it lacked the legal standing to sue and failed to prove that the Legislature overstepped its authority when it voted to expand voting rights for people who were formerly incarcerated for a felony. The high court agreed.

Before the new law, felons had to complete their probation before they could regain their eligibility to vote. An estimated 55,000 people with felony records gained the right to vote as a result.

Minnesota Democratic Attorney General Keith Ellison had been pushing for the change since he was in the Legislature.

“Democracy is not guaranteed — it is earned by protecting and expanding it,” Ellison said in a statement. “I’m proud restore the vote is definitively the law of the land today more than 20 years after I first proposed it as a state legislator. I encourage all Minnesotans who are eligible to vote to do so and to take full part in our democracy.”

Minnesota was among more than a dozen states that considered restoring voting rights for felons in recent years. Advocates for the change argued that disenfranchising them disproportionately affects people of color because of biases in the legal system. An estimated 55,000 Minnesota residents regained the right to vote because of the change.

Nebraska officials went the other way and decided last month that residents with felony convictions could still be denied voting rights despite a law passed this year to immediately restore the voting rights of people who have finished serving their felony convictions. That decision by Nebraska’s attorney general and secretary of state, both of whom are Republicans, has been challenged in a lawsuit.