CHICAGO — A federal judge has sentenced a man to more than 14 years in prison for firing at least 14 shots during a failed carjacking and then successfully hijacking another car nearby. Anthony Blackburn, 22, was on felony pretrial release for another stolen vehicle case when he committed the crimes.
At 2:15 p.m. on November 16, 2020, a man was driving in the 4700 block of West Polk when another driver cut him off. Blackburn emerged from the other vehicle’s back seat with a handgun equipped with an auto-fire switch that could make it operate like a machine gun, prosecutors said.
Blackburn ran to the victim’s car and ordered him out at gunpoint. But the driver accelerated instead, and Blackburn unleashed a torrent of 14 shots at the fleeing vehicle. The victim was not shot, but bullets shattered his rear window and both driver’s side windows. A round struck a door handle, which shattered, and a fragment of the handle embedded in his arm.
“Many people would have called it a day after a failed carjacking and a near murder,” a federal prosecutor wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “But [the] defendant kept going.”
Blackburn walked to a Lexus SUV parked nearby with two men inside. He ordered them out at gunpoint and drove away with their car. The entire scene was allegedly captured on surveillance video.
Four days later, Cicero police found the hijacked car at a motel in their city. Surveillance video showed Blackburn getting out of the hijacked vehicle and going into a room, prosecutors said. Police searched the room and allegedly found Blackburn inside with a loaded handgun that still had the machine gun switch attached along with an extended ammunition magazine. Laboratory testing confirmed the firearm was the same weapon that fired the shots on Polk Street.
In their sentencing memo, prosecutors acknowledged Blackburn’s difficult upbringing.
“His childhood was an extremely difficult one; his mother was addicted to drugs, and his father sold drugs. At a very young age, defendant lost friends to gun violence,” they wrote.
The feds asked for a sentence of 192 months. Blackburn’s attorney sought 97 months.
After Blackburn pleaded guilty to carjacking and using a firearm during the commission of a violent crime, U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman settled on 171 months, equal to 14 years and three months.
