http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/11/29/bodybuilding-champion-suspect-in-slew-of-holdups.htmlA year ago, Miguel E. Neil was onstage, flashing a big smile and flexing chiseled muscles as he took first place in his weight class at the National Bodybuilding Championships in Miami Beach.
It seemed as if Neil had turned his life around. Behind him was a five-year sentence for a Columbus bank robbery. He left federal prison for that crime in 2005 and, just two years later, was photographed with Arnold Schwarzenegger after winning the men’s bodybuilding title in the Arnold Amateur.
Today, the 41-year-old Neil is in the Franklin County jail facing robbery and kidnapping charges after police say he robbed a Wendy’s on Nov. 8 and a Bureau of Motor Vehicles agency on Nov. 15.
Neil is suspected in dozens of other robberies, police say, and officers were watching him when he robbed the BMV office on the Far North Side as it was closing at 6:30 p.m. They arrested him after hitting him with a cruiser, shooting at him but missing and bringing him down with a Taser inside a children’s dance studio.
Those who know Neil as a mild-mannered personal trainer who hoped to turn bodybuilding from a hobby into a career said they are shocked by his arrest.
Neil had enormous potential, said Mike Davies, promoter of the Arnold Amateur and owner of Metro Fitness Worthington. Davies said he has coached nearly 200 bodybuilders to the professional level and had thought Neil would be another. Now, “I wouldn’t see how that could be, in light of what he’s facing,” Davies said yesterday.
He knew that Neil had a criminal past. In addition to the federal time for the bank robbery in 1998, Neil served three stints in Ohio prisons — seven months in 1991 for receiving stolen property, nearly two years starting in 1992 for theft and receiving stolen property, and six months in 1997 for attempted burglary.
“But I think he used bodybuilding to change his life,” Davies said.
Neil’s attorney, Dennis W. McNamara, said he wasn’t sure what kind of personal or financial circumstances Neil, a married father, was in at the time of his arrest.
Nobody answered the door at Neil’s home at 5584 Crawford Dr. on the North Side yesterday.
Neil was a personal trainer for five years at Powell Fitness, where he was polite to the staff and dedicated to his clients, said owner Kim Larosa. Nothing in the way he acted suggested he ever had spent time in prison, which Larosa said she was unaware of.
“This is not a side of him that we knew,” she said.
Davies plans to go to the county jail to ask Neil about the charges he is facing.
“He got a second chance, and apparently he screwed up,” Davies said.
