NC man carjacked a Ford with a baby still strapped inside. Then he wrecked the car.
When Maurice Rakestraw stole a couple’s Ford Taurus at gunpoint in 2019, he stole their baby boy too.
When he wrecked and flipped the car over in east Charlotte, according to court documents in his case, Rakestraw ran from the scene. He still carried his handgun. But he left behind a 1-year-old still buckled into his car seat, dangling upside down.
In short, Rakestraw, a 31-year-old Charlotte resident and convicted felon, had a lot to answer for when he stood before U.S. District Judge Bob Conrad last Thursday.
Conrad had the last word. The judge sentenced Rakestraw to 22 years in prison for a series of carjacking and weapons convictions, along with five years of supervised release.
The baby? He survived, thanks in part to the occupants of a truck Rakestraw had collided with near Eastway and Arnold drives — an impact that sent the stolen Ford tumbling onto its roof.
When the injured Rakestraw fled on foot after the wreck, the truck’s driver and passengers discovered the baby in the backseat of the overturned Ford. They pried open a door, shimmied inside and pulled the infant to safety.
The rescuers are not identified in court documents. Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Stetzer praised them after Rakestraw’s sentencing.
“I want to thank the good Samaritans who helped save a helpless baby from the wreckage, after Rakestraw fled the scene,” Stetzer said in a statement to the Observer. “The selfless actions of these ordinary heroes averted what could have been an awful tragedy.”
Prosecutors say Rakestraw knew on Dec. 5, 2019, that the baby was strapped in the car as he was stealing it. He needed the car because he was being chased at the time by Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Officer Adam Thompson.
Moments before, Rakestraw had bolted on foot from an Albemarle Road traffic stop tied to a police investigation of a series of shootings in north Charlotte, according to a law enforcement affidavit attached to Rakestraw’s criminal complaint.
When Thompson asked him to get out of the car, Rakestraw, the subject of several outstanding arrest warrants at the time, gave him a phony name. When the officer began frisking him for a weapon, Rakestraw acted as if were complying then sprinted away, holding something heavy in the left pocket of his pants as he ran, the affidavit says.
He quickly reached the parking lot of a nearby apartment complex and came across a white Ford with two people inside. Rakestraw pulled a handgun — the same 9mm Taurus he had stolen from his former girlfriend two days earlier, according to the affidavit — tapped it on the chest of the Ford’s driver and said he would kill him if he didn’t give up the car.
According to prosecutors, the driver and a female companion got of the car, then frantically tried to remove their child from the car seat. But the father had unbuckled only one of the straps when Rakestraw pulled away.
Thompson, in pursuit, had watched the carjacking unfold as he approached the parking lot. He saw a Ford speeding off with a car seat in the back, the affidavit says. The couple kept screaming in Spanish about their baby. Then he understood.
Thompson ran after the car, according to the affidavit. He called in a description of the Ford and the direction it had taken.
Six minutes later, Rakestraw plowed into the back of a trailer being pulled by the truck at Eastway and Arnold. He escaped out a passenger window, repositioned the gun in his pocket and ran again, witnesses said.
This time, he followed Arnold Drive onto the campus of Merry Oaks International Academy. A CMPD helicopter spotted him there. When police arrived, according to prosecutors, Rakestraw was walking down a sidewalk. He ran one last time, disappearing into some nearby woods.
Rakestraw was arrested in the school yard. He pleaded guilty in November to four felony charges stemming from the December 2019 carjacking and theft of the handgun two days earlier. He remains in custody in the Mecklenburg County Jail awaiting transfer to a federal prison.
