When prosecutors asked a Cook County judge to detain Jacob Sickel as a public safety threat after charging him with three armed robberies, she sent him home on an ankle monitor instead. Two years later, Sickel pleaded guilty Thursday, and thanks to the credit he earned while wearing that monitor, he has roughly 10 months left to serve behind bars.
Sickel, 22, of Brookfield, was sentenced to six years in prison on each of three counts of armed robbery, to be served concurrently. But by the time he stood in court Thursday, he had already accumulated 788 days of sentence credit on the monitor, and after applying the state’s standard 50 percent sentence reduction to his six-year term, roughly 308 days remain.
The robberies occurred on a Monday morning in February 2024. Prosecutors said Sickel and an unidentified accomplice worked their way across the South Side for two hours, targeting people sitting alone in parked vehicles. One man wore a black mask, the other white.
Starting around 5 a.m., the pair held a gun to a woman as she sat in her car in the 6300 block of South Mozart and demanded her valuables, prosecutors said. A short time later, they robbed a man in the 6900 block of South Pulaski. Around 7 a.m., they took an iPad from someone in the 3000 block of East 88th Street.
Within 20 minutes of that last robbery, Chicago police spotted a stolen Kia believed to be connected to the crimes. The driver crashed in the 5500 block of South Wells Street while trying to avoid a traffic stop, and two men ran. The driver, who prosecutors say also brandished the gun during the robberies, escaped. Sickel did not.
Officers said he was still carrying some of the second victim’s property when they caught him. His arrest report described him as an admitted member of the 12th Street Players street gang in Berwyn.
At a detention hearing, prosecutors laid out those allegations before Judge Kelly McCarthy and asked her to keep Sickel locked up as a public safety threat. She sent him home on an ankle monitor instead.
Under Illinois’ SAFE-T Act, defendants on pretrial monitoring receive day-for-day sentence credit, whether they are confined to their home or out during the two days per week of “essential movement” the law allows. All 788 days Sickel spent on the monitor counted toward the prison sentence he received Thursday from Judge Peggy Chiampas.
Original reporting you’ll see nowhere else, paid for by our readers. Click here to support our work.
