CHICAGO — A Chicago man has been sentenced to 10 years for carjacking, kidnapping, and robbing two victims in the city and suburbs. And he got another eight years for a crime he committed while in jail.
The first carjacking occurred in Uptown on April 21, 2021. A 33-year-old man was in his car in the 1200 block of West Winnemac when Williams slid into his passenger seat and implied he had a gun under his jacket, officials said.
Williams went through the car’s glove box and center console, took $10 from the victim, and ordered him to drive. As they rode down the Kennedy Expressway, Williams allegedly demanded the man’s phone PIN and passwords to his Citibank and CashApp accounts.
At one point, Williams transferred $2,500 from the victim’s CashApp to an account with the user name “Travis Williams,” which detectives later determined was established by a person with Williams’s full legal name, home address, and birthday.
Williams eventually ordered the victim to drive into a parking lot off the expressway, where they changed seats. Williams started driving before he took more property from the man and ordered him out of the car. The entire ordeal lasted 45 minutes.
A couple of weeks later, Williams committed a similar crime in Forest Park, officials said. Sliding into the passenger seat of a woman’s car with a jacket wrapped around his hand and implying he had a gun, Williams allegedly made the woman drive around to various ATMs in the suburbs and Chicago. But she could not make withdrawals due to insufficient funds.
He eventually let the woman go after she repeatedly begged to be taken home. But Williams kept her car, which he crashed into another vehicle while driving against traffic in North Riverside, officials said. That’s when police arrested him in both cases.
This week, Williams pleaded guilty to vehicular hijacking in the Uptown case and received a 10-year sentence from Judge Steven Watkins. In the suburban case, he pleaded guilty to aggravated kidnapping. Watkins ordered him to serve 85% of a 10-year sentence for that.
Williams also pleaded guilty to aggravated arson—officials said they caught him trying to set his mattress on fire in the Cook County jail—in exchange for a consecutive eight-year sentence. According to court records, the arson sentence will also be served at 85%.
So, all combined, the effective sentence is 85% of eighteen years. His parole date has not yet been published on the Illinois Department of Corrections web page.
Prosecutors dropped several cases entirely in their plea deal with Williams, including four aggravated battery cases he picked up in jail and a leaving the scene of an accident charge, records show.
In the carjacking cases, prosecutors dropped vehicular hijacking, vehicular invasion, identity theft, and multiple counts of kidnapping.