Jaquay Marlon Jean, 21, was detained in North Miami yesterday by officers from the Martin County Sheriff’s Warrants Unit and U.S. Marshals Regional Fugitive Task Force after he allegedly sped off in the hijacked vehicle with a grandmother and infant still inside.
Police said the incident occurred as the family were parked at a Mobil gas station on Florida State Road 714. The suspect, who was holding a gun at the time, walked up to the car and attacked the female driver.
In surveillance footage of the altercation, which took place Sunday around 2:40 p.m., the woman can be seen trying to fend off the assailant, who drags her from the vehicle and pushes her to the ground.
A male exits the car shortly before the suspect jumps into the driver’s seat and speeds off. Investigators said a 4-month-old child and the grandmother had been briefly kidnapped before being let out of the vehicle approximately a mile away.
According to local news website TCPalm, the suspect was arrested Monday after leaving a home in North Miami. It reported the driver as being 42-years-old and identified the man who was seen leaving the car as the woman’s brother, 27. The passengers were not injured.
Speaking to WPLG, grandmother Joanne Sagona said: “I was like, ‘How do I survive? I said, OK, please pull over. Stop. I will take the baby, get out and you can keep going.’”
“You can recover from that,” Sagona continued, discussing the carjacking. “You can’t recover from a gunshot to the face two inches away. We got lucky.”
On Facebook yesterday, the Martin County Sheriff’s Office released images of Jean and police cars which had pinned the suspect’s car during what is known as a “high profile stop.”
“Our information leads us to be pretty confident that he did this solely to get transportation back to Miami,” Martin County Sheriff, William J. Snyder, told WPTV, referencing Jean. The female driver, who suffered undisclosed injuries in the incident, was taken to hospital for treatment.
Snyder said the stolen car was also involved in a high-speed chase in Miami-Dade County on Sunday, reaching speeds of more than 100 miles-per-hour before escaping. The investigation remains ongoing to determine if Jean was the person behind the wheel at the time.
Jean was taken back to Martin County and detained on felony charges of armed carjacking and armed kidnapping and was being held in jail on a $400,000 bond, WPLG reported.
