* Honorable Lenore C. Nesbitt, Senior U. S. District Judge for the Southern District of Florida, sitting by designation. [PUBLISH]
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT

________________________ No. 99-4240

________________________ D. C. Docket No. 98-00117-CR-ASG UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee,
versus ALFRED WAYNE LEE, Defendant-Appellant.

________________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida

_________________________ (April 13, 2000) Before COX, Circuit Judge, HILL, Se nior Circuit Judge, and NESBITT * , Senior District Judge.
PER CURIAM:1 Lee’s other challenges to his c onviction and sentence do not warrant discussion. See 11th Cir. R. 36-1. 2 Alfred W. Lee, Sr. was caught pawning a shotgun, and he was convicted for possessing a firearm as a convicted felon, inviolation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). Lee appeals, challenging among other rulings the district court’s conclusion that he had been convicted of three viol ent felonies, and thus was subject to the armed-careercriminal mandatory minimum sentence of 18 U.S.C. § 924(e), the Armed Career Criminal Act. 1 We affirm. Two of the three predicate convictions , one for strong-arm robbery and the other for burglary, resulted from conduct occurring on the same day in 1993. On that day, Lee first robbed a credit union at gunpoi nt. Having collected $300, he made a successful getaway in a Dodge Omni. An officer responding at the scene immediately issued a bulletin with a description of Lee and the Omni. Within a few minutes, another officer in a nearby jurisdiction spo tted the Omni, now rolling with a flat tire, about two miles from the credit union. Th e officer stopped the car, but Lee fled on foot. Officers surrounded the area and finally caught Lee as he exited a backyard storage shed where he had broken in and hidden. The district court concluded, on these facts, that there was enough of a break between the robbery and the burglary fo r the two to be “committed on occasions2 See Walker v. Mortham , 158 F.3d 1177, 1188-89 (11th Cir. 1998). 3 different from one another” as required by 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(1) to treat them as separate felonies, and the court accordingly sentenced Lee as an armed career criminal to 210 months’ incarceration. Lee’s contention on appeal, as it was in the district court, is that the robbery and the burglary were a single criminal episode, and thus do not count as two separate felonies for thes e purposes. This is anissue of law, which we review de novo. See United States v. Pope , 132 F.3d 684, 689 (11th Cir. 1998). Two cases from this circuit come very close to interpreting § 924(e) on similar facts. In the first, United States v. Sweeting , 933 F.3d 962, 967 (11th Cir. 1991), the defendant burglarized one house and then , as the police approached, broke into another house to hide. In the second case, United States v. Pope , 132 F.3d 684, 692 (11th Cir. 1998), the defendant committed two burglaries two hundred yards apart on the same night. The Sweeting panel held that the two burglaries were committed on the same “occasion” under the statute, and thus counted as one felony; the Pope panel reached the opposite conclusion on its facts. Lee would have us read the two cases either as conflicting (in which case the olde r case would control this panel’s decision 2 ) or to view his facts as closer to Sweeting than Pope
. We reject both of these cont entions. The rule stated in Pope comports with the result in Sweeting , which was reached without extended discussion. Popeheld that4 “so long as predicate crimes are successive rather than simultaneous, they constitute separate criminal episodes for purposes of the ACCA.” Pope , 132 F.3d at 692. By “successive,” the Popepanel meant that the crimes were separated by “a meaningful opportunity to desist . . . activity before committing the second offense,” id. at 690, and that the crimes reflected “distinct aggressions, especially if the defendant committed the crimes in different places,” id. at 692. The Sweeting and Popepanels’ different conclusions simply reflect the panels’ judgment on the degree of break betweenthe first and second crimes. The Sweeting court evidently concluded (its recitation of the facts of the predicate crimes is not detailed enough to tell for sure ) that Sweeting, being under the pressure of hot pursuit after the commission of his first crime, ha d no meaningful opportunity to avoid his second crime, which was part of the same aggressive conduct, and in the same area, as his first burglary. In Pope , on the other hand, the pane l observed that Pope had time to stop his criminal activity rath er than undertake a second crime. See id. at 692. This case comes closer to Pope than Sweeting because of the significant separation between the credit union robbery and th e shed burglary. It is true that the crimes represent one course of criminal conduct, but so did the burglaries in Pope
. The more important point is that as in Pope , Lee here successfully completed his first crime. He got away. Onlyafter he was spotted some two miles away based on a5 description of his car did he set into moti on the chain of events leading to his second crime, and that crime was committed in a completely different venue. That break makes the crimes successive, distinct aggressions. The district court thus properly sentenced Lee under § 924(e). AFFIRMED.