Columbia, S.C. ? Bruce Windsor lived the life of a respectable family man — father of four, deacon in his South Carolina church, youth soccer coach, a volunteer who helped build orphanages in Brazil. Then four days after his 43rd birthday, authorities say, he donned a mask, wig and sunglasses and tried to rob a bank at gunpoint.

Windsor brandished a black revolver inside Greenville First Bank on Feb. 26 and demanded that bank workers fill a bag and two boxes with cash, according to an FBI affidavit. But police caught on and trapped Windsor inside with the bank workers for 90 minutes before he surrendered to a SWAT team.

Windsor, it turns out, was falling down a financial hole. A real estate investor who ran several property business, his troubles predated the recession but continued as the housing bubble burst and easy credit for businesses and consumers dried up.

At his bond hearing, Windsor’s tearful sister told a judge her brother must have fallen on hard financial times and cracked under the stress.

“This is something Bruce has never done,” Lisa Weaver told the judge. “The only thing I can think of is he must’ve just snapped under the pressure. … I can’t imagine the desperation that must have caused this.”

Clad in an orange jumpsuit, his hands cuffed at his waist, Windsor calmly told the judge, “I’ve never stolen anything in my life.”

Windsor is one of a growing list of unlikely suspects, ordinary people from ministers to ex-cops citing financial duress since the start of the recession in late 2007 for allegedly turning to a crime that targets fast cash — bank robbery.

Money troubles, specifically job losses, have also been named as possible motives in at least four of the mass shootings that have scarred the country this winter, including the deaths of 13 people and a gunman in Binghamton, N.Y., the killings of three police officers in Pittsburgh and four more plus the shooter in Oakland, Calif., and the deaths of 10 people and a gunman in south Alabama.

Bank holdups haven’t grabbed the same attention, but industry figures show they go up during recessions, and experts say the pressure inevitably pushes some otherwise law-abiding people to find themselves accosting a teller at a window.

“I would expect, as the downturn continues and lasts well over a year, that we will see more and more cases like this one, of someone without a record feeling they have no options and turning to crime,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

The latest FBI statistics tallied 1,617 bank robberies in the fourth quarter of 2008, up from 1,358 in the third quarter and 1,561 a year earlier, although there are no statistics that differentiate between first-timers and repeat criminals in bank heists.