A crash-and-grab burglary crew broke into a South Side gas station before dawn, ripped out the Bitcoin machine, loaded it into an SUV, realized they had made a horrible mistake, and then went back inside and grabbed the ATM instead. Prosecutors say that chain of decisions eventually led one of them to steal a Cook County sheriff’s deputy’s patrol car right outside the Cook County Jail and race it down the Dan Ryan Expressway at 115 mph.
Charles Castleberry, 22, Rakan Eid, 21, Jemel Maple, 23, and Lashon Williams, 25, face burglary charges after a nearly two-hour crime spree detailed in court filings. Castleberry faces additional charges, including aggravated possession of a stolen motor vehicle and aggravated fleeing. Maple and Williams are also charged with unlawful use of a weapon by a felon. Judge James Murphy detained all four men.
It began at 5:51 a.m. on May 16 at the SNK Fuels gas station at 2807 West 71st Street, according to prosecutors. Two stolen Jeeps pulled into the lot and one of them rammed the station wall repeatedly until it punched through. Eid, Maple, and Castleberry climbed out of the second Jeep, entered through the hole, and loaded a Bitcoin machine into their SUV, prosecutors claim.
Then they stopped, apparently realizing they had grabbed a cryptocurrency machine rather than a cash ATM. So they unloaded it, went back inside, took the ATM, put it in the Jeep, and drove off, prosecutors said. They left the ramming vehicle behind, a vehicle that had been reported stolen a week earlier in Streeterville.
Less than 90 minutes later, the Jeep arrived at the BP station at 2800 West 55th Street. Eid and Maple allegedly walked in through the front door and took turns trying to pry the ATM off the wall. Prosecutors say Williams joined them inside, but the ATM wouldn’t budge, so he went back to the Jeep, and returned with an electric saw, which he and Castleberry took turns using to try to cut into the cash machine.
For five minutes, as the clerk hid and called 911, they allegedly sawed on the machine to no avail. Prosecutors say they fled just as the first officer arrived.
That officer pursued the Jeep, with Castleberry at the wheel, for roughly eight minutes before it crashed into a utility pole outside the Cook County Jail at California and 31st Street. All four men jumped out and ran. CPD and a Cook County sheriff’s deputy assigned to patrol the jail perimeter rounded up Eid, Maple, and Williams.
Castleberry supposedly found another way out. Prosecutors say he jumped behind the wheel of the deputy’s patrol car and, despite efforts by the police to pull him out, drove away.
Prosecutors said Castleberry reached 115 mph in a 45 mph zone, made it to the Dan Ryan, and then blew through the control arm of a Skyway tollbooth without slowing down. Then, he allegedly circled back toward the city and blew through a second tollbooth arm before returning to surface streets. Illinois State Police troopers eventually deployed spike strips near 87th and Ingleside, slowing the squad car enough for a trooper to execute a PIT maneuver, spinning it out.
Back at the crash scene near the jail, police recovered three firearms, an electric saw, several thousand dollars in cash, and a broken piece of plexiglass bearing the letters “ATM.”
