A Chicago man was sentenced Tuesday to 13 years in prison for participating in two carjackings while wearing an ankle monitor for a pending felony gun case.
In early 2024, prosecutors asked a judge to detain then 19-year-old Eric Smith as a public safety threat, saying he was caught with a loaded Micro Draco AK-47 pistol after running from the wreckage of a crashed, stolen car. Judge Charles Beach, who was recently selected to be the next Chief Judge of Cook County, rejected the request and instead imposed a curfew and electronic monitoring.
That ankle monitor came in handy for Chicago police a few weeks later. They used its GPS history to link Smith to two armed carjackings that occurred when he was supposed to be on house arrest.
Chicago police issued a community alert about four recent carjackings in the Hyde Park neighborhood that detectives tied to the same group of suspects. Up to four masked men were getting out of a vehicle to target victims who were near or inside cars. The group displayed guns, demanded the victims’ wallets and phones, and then drove away in their vehicles, according to the alert…