Nate Fleming had pulled up at a gas station in Northeast Washington on his way home when the red minivan appeared out of the corner of his eye. The van sped up and screeched to a halt next to his dark 2014 BMW sedan.

Video captured what happened next.

Two people — masked and dressed in all black — flung open the doors of the van and jumped out. One pointed a gun at Fleming, who threw his keys and ran, while the other got into the BMW. Both cars then sped away. Fleming later walked home to his wife.

As a D.C. Council candidate at the time, Fleming often talked about public safety. But that January 2022, in broad daylight, he became the victim of a violent crime that had grown at a staggering rate in the D.C. area during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and that continues to surge.




© Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post
Nate Fleming lost his vehicle to an armed carjacker last year, and three teenagers were arrested in the case.

Number of carjackings in the D.C. area

In 2018, authorities in D.C. and its neighboring jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia reported a little more than 200 carjackings, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from area police departments. By the end of 2022, that number swelled to more than 1,000, with the majority reported in D.C. and Prince George’s County. Despite the launch of task forces to address the problem and a slowdown since pandemic peaks, carjackings each year since 2018 have surpassed the previous year’s total.




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Carjackings — which involve violence or the threat of violence and is a different crime from unoccupied cars being stolen — have become so prevalent in the District that they became a political talking point as Congress debated D.C.’s crime and policing bills. D.C. currently averages one reported carjacking per day compared with every three days in the two years before the pandemic.

As carjackings spike in D.C. and Prince George’s, officials focus on youths

Cities nationwide are facing the same burden. According to a Post analysis of crime reports from 2018 to March 2023, Chicago, Fort Worth, New Orleans and San Francisco also recorded an increase in carjackings during the pandemic. Data shows those crimes have remained at elevated levels in each city.

Officials and community leaders have said gaps in the social safety net that were widened by the pandemic explain some of the uptick in carjackings and increased arrests of juveniles charged with the crime.

In the end, scores of victims are left traumatized. Some have been injured or killed.

Lee Alexander Thomas, 54, was killed in December by teens trying to steal his BMW at a gas station in Largo, according to police. The Washington Commanders fan and local bus driver was fatally shot after assailants confronted him and he wouldn’t give up his car, according to his older brother, Ernest Thomas.

“There’s no safeguard,” Ernest Thomas said. “He wasn’t doing anything that a normal citizen wouldn’t be doing, getting gas in his car. … You can’t stay in the house all the time.”

Most common locations for carjackings in D.C.

The District and Prince George’s County have accounted for almost all of the region’s reported carjackings in recent years, according to statistics that date to 2018 and were reviewed by The Post. Montgomery County, Fairfax County and Arlington have seen increases in carjackings — though raw totals aren’t as high as for D.C., where at various times during the pandemic the city averaged more than two carjackings a day.

Areas such as Fairfax and Arlington counties and the city of Alexandria tallied about 90 carjackings in total from 2020 through early spring 2023.

D.C. reported about 140 carjackings in 2018, which jumped to 360 in 2020. By 2022, the number was 485. Prince George’s County reported 78 carjackings in 2019. That swelled to more than 260 by 2020 and 541 by 2022. As of early May, the county had reported 155 carjackings — about 4 percent more than at this time last year.

In the District, most carjackings occur in Wards 5, 7 and 8, which share a border with Prince George’s County. In many instances, police say, carjackings involve perpetrators crisscrossing the jurisdictions.

James Albert Borum had just turned 18 when he went on a carjacking rampage in Maryland in June 2021 while wearing an ankle monitor related to armed-carjacking charges in Washington. One of the victims was pregnant. In three of the carjackings, he had a gun.

Someone tapped on his car window, then pointed a gun. It was yet another carjacking in the D.C. region.

“Not even an ankle monitor could dissuade the defendant from committing these instant carjackings and under remarkably similar circumstances as the carjackings for which he was arrested in D.C.,” Jared Engelking, a special assistant U.S. attorney, said at Borum’s sentencing in January, according to court transcripts. “He and his accomplice, you know, held guns to victims’ heads … and they pushed victims to the ground, and they stole four cars.”

Borum pleaded guilty in July 2022 to carjacking and using, carrying and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence. A relative declined to comment when reached for this story.

At his sentencing hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, prosecutors and his attorney sparred over what the appropriate punishment was for someone his age. Engelking wanted to deter “would-be carjackers in the community” because the crime “has become more and more prevalent, especially in recent years, in both D.C. and in Maryland,” according to court transcripts.

But Andrew Szekely, a federal public defender representing Borum, warned against overly harsh sentences and “over-penalization” that would later require a “course correction,” according to court transcripts.




© Katie Mettler/The Washington Post
U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Md.

Szekely said his client was “a decent student, a very talented point guard, and his dream was to go to college, to play college basketball.” But after Borum’s brother was killed, Borum “began to abuse drugs, he stopped going to school, he lost his sports eligibility, and he began to act out.”

In a handwritten letter to the court, Borum took “full responsibility” and apologized.

“What I did was wrong and cruel, and I never should have done it,” said Borum, himself a robbery victim. He added: “I know what it is like to be in front of a gun, and there is no excuse for it.”

He was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.

Who is getting arrested?

More juveniles are being arrested over carjackings in D.C. and Prince George’s, authorities said. But with many cases unsolved, it’s not clear whether youths are largely responsible for the crime surge.

In Fleming’s case, police arrested a 17-year-old and two 15-year-olds. One of the younger teens was also charged in the killing of a 19-year-old, a shooting that occurred three days after Fleming stopped for gas. The teen later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

Fleming grew up in Wards 7 and 8 but said he started to feel unsafe in Washington only in the summer of 2020.

At the time, working on the D.C. Council’s Committee on Recreation, Libraries and Youth Affairs, he noticed that crime victims and perpetrators were getting younger. He also surveyed crime data and saw that carjackings were beginning to surge.

“I did have a weird feeling that I would end up being touched by this violence, because so many people were beginning to be personally touched by violence,” Fleming said.




© Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post
Nate Fleming walks near gas pumps on May 10 at the gas station where he was carjacked at gunpoint last year in Washington.

Prosecutors in Prince George’s say 2021 was the first time they saw more young people being charged in carjackings than adults. A pause in in-person learning and a lack of supervised activities during the pandemic are partly to blame, they said.

“The kids were looking for things to do. … Some of them were cries for help, some of it was just the children were working with adults,” said Lynn Celestin-Antonin, chief of the youth justice unit at the Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office. “We can’t prove that they were working with some adults, but in speaking to some of them, there is a connection.”

In Prince George’s, as of May 24, there have been 201 reported carjackings this year, with 33 adult arrests and 50 juvenile arrests, police said. According to D.C. police data as of May 24, there have been 294 carjackings in the city and 40 arrests in such cases, including 25 involving juveniles. Often, multiple people are arrested in a single carjacking case.




© Erin Kenney/Erin Kenney
Two teenage girls pleaded guilty to murder charges in an armed carjacking that resulted in the death of a food-delivery driver and the destruction of his vehicle on March 23, 2021, near Nationals Park in D.C. The girls were put in the custody of the city’s youth-rehabilitation agency.

Tia Bell, founder of a gun-violence-prevention nonprofit group in D.C. called the Trigger Project, said she is considering expanding the scope of her work to focus on carjackings because of their increasing prevalence in her neighborhood. Bell said she personally knows several young people who have carried out carjackings.

One told Bell he wanted to “joyride” to the National Harbor to get a gift for his girlfriend. Another said he wanted attention from a family member. A third told her he was scared of using public transportation because of neighborhood feuds, she said.

“It’s an epidemic,” she said of carjackings. “A gun makes an invisible person feel invincible. A carjacking is doing the same.”

Bell said there is a widespread feeling among youths that they can escape punishment.

In May, the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. charged a 17-year-old as an adult in multiple armed carjackings. Charging documents in the investigation conducted by D.C. police and the FBI say the teen was seen on surveillance video at a garage where several stolen cars were being parked and where license plates were being swapped.

Jaelen Jordan’s attorney, Elliott J. Queen, said his client is innocent and was “unfairly” charged as an adult because of the climate of concern about such carjackings in the city.

Queen said this was Jordan’s first arrest and argued in court to have him released and placed on GPS monitoring in time for his high school graduation. But the teen was ordered held in D.C. jail until trial.

“I don’t think it’s fair to him,” Queen said. “The mood of the city and carjackings and because there have been so many is what is driving this train. If there is some alleged activity that is going on with juveniles, correct the alleged activity in juvenile court, so they don’t end up in the adult system.”

The attorney general’s office in D.C., headed by Brian Schwalb, prosecutes most juvenile carjacking and gun cases in the city.

“We recognize that, to protect public safety, sometimes kids need to be taken off the streets and removed from the community for a period of time,” he said. “We also try to make sure every young person who commits a crime — including those we hold accountable through commitment and confinement — receives the mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, educational support and other resources that they need to get back on track so that they won’t reoffend.”

Schwalb said the city needs a strategy to “stop crime from happening in the first place” and support youths who commit crimes after being victims of violence themselves.

“They are too frequently exposed to violence at home or in the community, they may not have a stable place to live or trusted adults in their lives,” he said, “and they often have easier access to guns than to mental health supports or trauma-related care.”

Heather N. Pinckney is director of the District’s Public Defender Service, which represents the majority of youths charged with carjackings in the city. She said the rhetoric about how to reduce youth-involved carjackings echoes conversations in the 1980s and ’90s about the drug epidemic.

“The only solution offered then was more mass incarceration of an entire generation. And we know how that turned out,” she said. “Instead of doing the same thing, the District needs to invest deeply in the communities, programs and resources that children and families need to thrive and enable youth to make positive choices for the community and themselves.”

Seeking solutions




© Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post
Officials gather in February 2022 to discuss regional public safety initiatives concerning carjackings. From left: D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III, Prince George’s County Police Chief Malik Aziz, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks.

Carjackings can be hard to solve because identifying perpetrators is difficult and vehicles can change hands several times before they are recovered, if they are recovered at all, officials say.

“We’ve got cars that are seemingly just used for joyriding and then they’re parked and abandoned when we recover them,” D.C. police Capt. Jeffrey Kopp said. “We absolutely know that some of these cars are involved in [additional] crimes. I think there’s any number of other things people could be doing with them.”

Some stolen cars are being purchased as part of a “growing illegal market,” said Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for D.C.

Puzzling spike in auto thefts, many of them violent, worries D.C.-area police

“This illegal market creates an economic motive for carjacking,” Graves said. “When I look at all of the data and facts, my impression is that these changing economic motives are why we see carjackings rise at the same time that we see robberies remain roughly flat at near-historic lows.”

In Maryland, prosecutors hope organized-crime legislation can help crack down on carjackings. Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha N. Braveboy said her office is working on a statute that would go after the entire carjacking ecosystem, from those selling and supplying the weapons used in these crimes to those directing the carjackings.

“Our goal is to hold everyone who’s involved in a carjacking incident accountable, not just those who are committing the actual carjacking, but those who are making it profitable for these individuals to commit the carjacking,” Braveboy said in an interview.

In addition, she has collaborated with faith leaders, educators, businesses and nonprofit organizations to host events that feature employment opportunities to deter crime through community engagement.

Teens drive brutal spike in carjackings with pandemic limiting school and supervision



© Katie Mettler/The Washington Post
Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy announces a new carjacking task force during a news conference on May 20, 2021, at the county courthouse in Upper Marlboro, Md.

As officials keep trying to fight the increase in carjackings, families of victims are left dealing with the consequences.

Ernest Thomas said his brother Lee was “very fun-loving” and the youngest of eight siblings.

On the night of Dec. 19, police knocked on the door of Ernest Thomas’s residence, where Lee Thomas was living at the time, and told him that his brother was shot at a gas station. Ernest Thomas was preparing to go to the hospital the next day when officers returned to tell him that his brother had died.

Ernest Thomas said police had video from the gas station showing the carjacking. He couldn’t bear to watch it.

Police arrested two teenagers in Lee Thomas’s killing.

Katie Mettler, Peter Hermann, Alice Crites and Dan Morse contributed to this report. Maps by Lauren Tierney.