Robert Maday is a criminal

Robert Maday is a 39-year-old career criminal who last year lost his battle, stated in a Web post, "to suppress the temptation to cut corners and work hard and appreciate being back in the world again."
So who is this man who escaped from two armed law-enforcement officers Thursday and spent the next 26-plus hours eluding police, allegedly carjacking vehicles and robbing another bank along the way?
"He's a good boy," said a source with detailed knowledge of Maday's family who asked to remain anonymous. "He was always a kind person. He would never hurt anyone."
Maday's two-day crime, in fact, did not physically harm anyone, the source said, despite the fugitive having many opportunities to inflict pain and suffering on motorists, the public, bank tellers and two state's attorney investigators.
Police reported that as they moved in to arrest Maday in West Chicago on Friday, he gestured as if he were going for a gun. Instead, he surrendered, falling to the ground.
So what drove a young man turn to a life of crime, time and again? It remains unclear, but the source says Maday felt abandoned as a child.
"He was a child who felt unloved," the source said. "He thought that nobody wanted him." After his parents' divorce, "it was very devastating for him. He was sent to live with his father in Florida. But he didn't want him. He went to live with an uncle and aunt..., but that didn't work out. He didn't think anyone cared about him."
And while Maday, who once attended Wheeling High School, ultimately has spent much of his adult life in prison, he's a man who apparently has set his sights on being an author and appears to have a love for literature.
More than anything, though, Maday did not want to be caged, yet apparently could not resist the temptations that would lead him back.
"For myself, I'll keep plugging away, crawling if I have to. I'm not going back. The world is too big, too beautiful and too varied to trade it in for the cage I just left," Maday wrote in 2006 of his vow not to return to prison. The vow came in a web posting that Maday apparently wrote in April 2006, commenting on a criminal case in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., involving a couple of men he claimed to have known in prison.
His escape on Thursday was not his first.
According to a criminal history included in the plea deal he reached this summer on federal bank-robbery charges, Maday was convicted of escape as a teenager in Dade County, Fla., in a wide-ranging 1987 case that also earned him convictions on charges of robbery, kidnapping, burglary, grand theft, conspiracy to commit a felony, aggravated battery, possession of a firearm while committing a crime and resisting an officer without violence.
He was on his way to be sentenced on the latest bank-robbery charges Thursday when he escaped, leading police on a manhunt through the West and Northwest suburbs.
Maday was released on the Florida charges in 1991, and within three years he had moved on to what would become his main criminal vocation of robbing banks.
Years earlier, however, Maday attended Wheeling High School, albeit for a short time. He was a freshman in the fall of 1985, but left the school in December to join an alternative outreach program in Miami, according to Northwest Suburban High School District 214 spokeswoman Venetia Miles.
His criminal history started before his 17th birthday. Within 18 months of leaving Wheeling High School, Maday would be sentenced to 10 years in prison for the teen crime spree and escape, but he'd only serve four years.
From there he moved to eastern Pennsylvania, where in 1993 he was convicted of indecent exposure, open lewdness and recklessly endangering another person in a suburb of Harrisburg in Dauphin County. That earned him a $110 fine and a year's probation, but just over a year later he was convicted in U.S. District Court of robbing a bank in Pennsylvania's Franklin County along with another state case of robbery, earning him a sentence of 12½ to 15 years.
Maday served 11 years in a federal penitentiary and another eight months in state prison and was paroled on Sept. 6, 2005.
From there, he returned to the Chicago area, where he apparently wrote the Web posting from Des Plaines about the two men he knew in Pennsylvania prison. He seemed to dismiss them as stupid for squandering their freedom.
"They both are gonna get what they have coming," he wrote. "It's hard to measure that kind of stupidity. Out of prison after years inside and within a year they're both finished. I've been out for six months after 12 inside. Easy? ... No. Worth the effort to suppress the temptation to cut corners and work hard and appreciate being back in the world again? Yeah. Sure prison can make a man worse coming out than he was going in, but to throw your whole life away for petty gains and sadistic inclinations reveals the mind of a fool."
Yet shortly more than two years later he'd be at it again, this time with what turned out to be a series of bank robberies.
According to his plea deal, Maday admitted to robbing Lake Zurich's Midwest Bank on Oct. 29 of last year, then attempting to rob the Benjamin Franklin Bank in Arlington Heights Nov. 5. That was followed by the successful robberies of First American Bank in Bloomingdale Nov. 6, the Hoffman Estates Community Bank Nov. 12, the McHenry Savings Bank in Huntley Nov. 21, the People's Bank of Arlington Heights Dec. 16 and finally the Harris Bank in Buffalo Grove on Dec. 29, after which he was apprehended by Schaumburg police on a traffic stop that turned up evidence of the theft.
Free and on the lam, he immediately went back to what he knew Friday morning, again robbing Bloomingdale's First American Bank, police say.
Yet Maday apparently wanted to get a taste of real freedom before appearing at the bank Friday morning. He stopped by the Prairie Station Pub on Ontarioville Road in Hanover Park for a drink late Thursday afternoon, according to the U.S. Marshal's Office. He was sitting on the patio out front after ordering a drink, but slipped away after two patrons inside began arguing over whether it was indeed Maday or not, according to a Bartlett man, Tom Nelson, who was at the bar at the time.
In another Web post in 2006, Maday said he had almost completed a book about prison life "with the expected narrative of killings and drugs and infamous persons," as well as "the inner struggle of so long an incarceration." He wrote that he was seeking an agent to shop it.
Instead, just over two years later, he returned to bank robbery.
In Maday's earlier 2006 post, he addressed a quote to his former prison acquaintances: "Life flowers out of the profoundest tragic depths." It's actually a quote by theologian Henry James Sr., father of Henry James the novelist: "Life flowers and fructifies out of the profoundest tragic depths."
Maday might well have come across it in R.W.B. Lewis' work of literary criticism on uniquely American notions of guilt and innocence, "The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century."
"My life is flowering now," Maday wrote, "and everything nourishes it."
Ashok Selvam and Kimberly Pohl contributed to this story