Chicago police are now warning citizens that an armed group of children as young as 10 years old are carrying out violent carjackings in the city's South Side.
Police suspect that these kids, age 10 to 17, are responsible for at least 16 such carjackings in the past month alone. In two of the robberies the children fired shots at their victims, but are not yet believed to have hit anyone with gunfire.
"I'm scared to use my garage. I don't feel safe in my neighborhood," said Alyssa Blanchard, an elementary school teacher at Chicago Public Schools who was carjacked by the kids recently.
Blanchard was carjacked July 14 while returning home in the early evening. As she pulled into her alley garage on South Kingston Avenue, she noticed a vehicle and three or four children come toward her.
Two children armed with handguns pointed them to her head and ordered her out of her BMW, she said. One child looked as young as 11, she said.
They took her purse, which had about $300 inside, and jumped inside her BMW and rode off, she said.
Blanchard said the children used her BMW the next day to carjack a woman in the parking lot of Trinity Hospital. In that carjacking, a 21-year-old was seated in her Lexus when four or five teens exited a BMW, with two of them confronting her with guns, police said.
"I teach this age group and I can't believe they would do this," Blanchard further said.
She's an elementary teacher.
She got carjacked at gunpoint by elementary-aged children.
The hellscape that is Chicago seems to only be getting worse.
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