A Chicago man with an ankle monitor who was already up on 160 charges, including murder, has been charged in a new shooting after allegedly being found with two guns in a stolen car.
Torrey Lewis, who has a long criminal record, was found wounded in a stolen car in the parking lot of an auto parts store in the south suburban Chicago town of Dolton, police said on Wednesday. Officers found a rifle and a handgun on the front passenger seat, and a second man was found shot in the back seat, WLS-TV reported.
Police say Lewis was involved in a gun fight that injured four people. The gunfight occurred when multiple people jumped out of two cars and began firing at each other.
The Cook County Sheriff’s department has admitted to having the suspect in the electronic monitor system but also noted that the convict was on one of his “free movement days,” and they were not monitoring him at the time he was involved in the shooting.
This “free movement day” consists of two days a week automatically granted to suspects and convicts on ankle monitors, a mandate that is contained in the state’s recently enacted soft-on-crime SAFE-T Act that also eliminated cash bail in the Land of Lincoln.
J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, speaks during an interview in Chicago on Feb. 23, 2023. (Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Officials did review the monitor’s GPS data and found that Lewis was either being chased or was allgedly chasing someone in the stolen car.
The tracking data revealed that Lewis left his home at 8:48 a.m. and “proceeded to travel at high rates of speed throughout the South Suburbs, at times reaching speeds of over 100 miles an hour, until he arrived at the scene of the shooting,” the Southland Journal reported.
Lewis was on electronic monitoring (EM) while awaiting trial for murder in a shooting from July that left Timothy Horace dead. Horace, who was disabled and in a wheel chair, was shot outside a movie theater in front of his girlfriend in Country Club Hills in 2017.
The suspect was initially held in jail. But in May 2020, his bond was reduced and he was placed on EM after posting the required ten percent.
Lewis has now been charged with felony aggravated unlawful use of a weapon for the incident in Dolton. But he is currently in the hospital for his injuries.
The incident is just another example of how badly the Democrat-driven SAFE-T Act has been for the state.
On its first day, Illinois county attorneys and sheriffs denounced the law as “absurd” for delivering “incoherent” results as judges are required to release a host of repeat offenders after their cases are heard.
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