A carjacking that began with a fake marijuana deal in South Chicago has ended with three guilty pleas and prison sentences ranging from six to 12 years, after investigators used a hidden Apple AirTag to track down the stolen Audi Q7. The case, which started on August 30, 2024, in the 8100 block of South Escanaba Avenue, wrapped up this month with sentencing before Cook County Judge Natosha Toller.
According to CWB Chicago, a 37-year-old man reported that two people took his Audi Q7 at gunpoint. Prosecutors said a supposed marijuana deal was used to lure the victim into the carjacking, with Mercedes Jones, who was 18 at the time, luring him by claiming she wanted to buy marijuana. Randle Archie, also 18 at the time, and another man then pointed a gun at the victim and took his SUV, per the outlet's report.
The victim followed the stolen SUV in another vehicle, and a 41-year-old woman was riding along with him when someone inside the hijacked SUV fired shots toward the pursuing car, grazing the woman in the shoulder. Chicago police responded to the scene after a ShotSpotter alert sounded in the 8300 block of South Exchange Avenue that same night, the outlet's report states.
How the AirTag Led Police to the Stolen SUV
Police tracked an AirTag attached to the victim's key fob, which helped them locate the stolen Audi, according to the same account. When Chicago police pulled the SUV over, both Randle Archie and Mercedes Jones were inside, and officers found the hijacked SUV's key fob in Archie's pants pocket. Archie was also carrying a loaded handgun with an extended magazine, per the report.
The third defendant, Akyreian Anders, was arrested about four months after the carjacking and will turn 20 later this month. Prosecutors initially accused Anders of firing the shot that grazed the woman during the pursuit. Following his December 2024 arrest, Cook County Judge Shauna Boliker ordered Anders held without bail, citing his “brazen acts of extreme violence,” as CWB Chicago reported at the time.
Guilty Pleas and Sentences
All three defendants ultimately pleaded guilty to aggravated vehicular hijacking rather than facing trial on the more serious allegations involving gunfire. Judge Toller sentenced Anders to 12 years, Archie to 10 years, and Jones to six years. Jones and Archie are both now 20 years old.
Aggravated vehicular hijacking is a Class X felony under Illinois law, carrying a mandatory sentence of six to 30 years with no possibility of probation, according to the Illinois General Assembly's criminal code. State law also allows for enhancements of 15 years for carrying a firearm during a carjacking and 20 years for personally discharging one, though none of the three defendants in this case were convicted with those enhancements attached despite the initial allegations of gunfire.
Each defendant is required to serve only 50% of their sentence, with credit applied for time already spent in Cook County jail. That reflects Illinois Truth in Sentencing rules, which generally require Class X aggravated vehicular hijacking convicts to serve half their term when the harshest firearm mandates don't apply, according to legal reference database CaseMine. In practice, that means Anders, Archie, and Jones are expected to serve roughly three to six years in state custody rather than the full lengths of their sentences.
Part of a Broader Citywide Pattern
The case fits into a larger pattern of how Chicago has fought carjackings in recent years. Citywide carjackings fell 27% during the first six months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, continuing a multi-year decline after the crime peaked at 2,151 reported incidents in 2021, Hoodline previously reported. Overall unattended motor vehicle thefts, notably, rose 8% during that same window.
Juvenile offenders under 18 accounted for 54% of all arrests tied to vehicular hijacking citywide in mid-2026, according to Chicago Police Department operational data. Both Jones and Archie were 18 at the time of this carjacking, just above that threshold, but their ages still reflect a broader trend of young people driving the city's carjacking arrests.
Multi-agency coordination through the regional Vehicular Hijacking Task Force, which combines resources from the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County Sheriff's Office, and the Illinois State Police, has pushed stolen vehicle recovery rates in the Chicago area to nearly 90%, with an average recovery time of just 18 hours, down from an eight-day average before the task force expanded, per a Facebook update from Fox 23 covering Illinois State Police operations. Cases involving hidden trackers like the AirTag in this incident have become an increasingly common tool for closing these cases quickly, echoing a similar pattern Hoodline reported over the summer, when a hidden AirTag helped Cleveland investigators track a carjacking suspect to an Alzheimer's care facility.
A Now-Defunct Alert System
The ShotSpotter alert that first drew Chicago police to the scene in August 2024 came from a system the city no longer uses. The City of Chicago officially decommissioned ShotSpotter on September 22, 2024, after Mayor Brandon Johnson opted not to renew the vendor's contract, with city officials later seeking proposals for a replacement system. That makes this case one of the final incidents in which the gunshot detection technology played a role in a Chicago police response.
Joint task force agreements with federal law enforcement also allow gun-involved Chicago carjackings to be reviewed for federal prosecution, where sentences can range from 15 years to life in prison, though it's unclear from available records whether federal charges were considered in this case. For now, the resolution rests with Cook County's Class X sentencing framework, leaving Anders, Archie, and Jones to serve out their state prison terms under the credit and good-conduct provisions that apply to their convictions.
