Man sues after being arrested for legitimate bank withdrawal

Think nothing is more infuriating than getting slapped with a hefty fee for overdrawing your bank account?

A Newark, Del., man was slapped into handcuffs for essentially trying to withdraw his own money, according to a federal civil-rights suit filed in Philadelphia.

Ivan Green, 45, is suing TD Bank - formerly Commerce Bank - and Brookhaven Borough for $1 million after he was arrested and jailed in 2007. A bank manager had called police when he tried to make a large withdrawal from his account.

"Everything they did to me was unwarranted, unnecessary and unprovoked. If it was not for my skin complexion, I don't think they would have treated me the way they did," said Green, who is black.

In March 2007, Green and his wife refinanced their home and received about $38,000. They planned to put $26,500 into their checking account and use $11,500 to pay American Express and other creditors.

But when Green picked up the checks, he took the sealed envelope to a Commerce Bank branch in Delaware and mistakenly deposited everything into the checking account, even though some of the checks were made out to their creditors, according to Green's attorney, Gerard Schrom. The entire $38,000 cleared nonetheless.

"All this money is his," Schrom said. "He didn't find this money on the street."

When Green tried to withdraw $30,000 at a Brookhaven branch a couple days later, however, the bank manager called police, and he was arrested on theft charges. The charges were dismissed, but he lost his job as a result of the incident.

Green, who now works for a medical equipment company in Delaware County, said he decided to withdraw the money on a whim to take his wife to dinner and buy his daughter a used car, then redeposit most of it back into the checking account.

"It was the first time that I've ever had that kind of money and I was excited," he said.

Even though some of the checks were made out to Green's creditors, Schrom said those payments were voluntary, not a requirement of the second mortgage. In a November pretrial ruling, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe sided with Green, saying that, under Pennsylvania law, a bank cannot claim that money belongs to someone else once it has credited it to a customer.

Michael Laffey, an attorney for Brookhaven Borough and police Sgt. Richard Fuller, said police acted appropriately. A spokeswoman for TD Bank, which purchased Commerce Bank last year, declined to comment on the suit. *