On an early February evening, Alexa Bambrick was driving her two children from East Memphis to their Cordova home when she briefly noticed a car behind her. 

Her 3-year-old daughter’s car seat had come unbuckled, so Bambrick pulled over to fix it, thinking no one was behind her. But the car that had been there just moments before was still there, with its headlights turned off. 

As Bambrick walked outside her car, trying to fix the buckle, a male individual with a gun approached her; two others hopped into her car’s front seats and pointed guns at her children. All three individuals were wearing hoodies and disposable face masks and appeared to be teenagers. 

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“The kid who had a gun on me was so young,” Bambrick said. “Arguably, he looked more scared, I think, than I was.”

The three youths took Bambrick’s laptop, work phone, personal phone, wallet and car, and they left her and her children on the side of a residential road without their coats or shoes. 

Bambrick and her children were some of the many victims of a recent rise in local car-related crimes — including carjackings, auto thefts and thefts from vehicles — much of which are being driven by juveniles.

Of the 240 distinct carjacking arrests MPD made in 2022, 42% – or 101 of them – were juveniles.

Here are some other car-crime statistics:

• There were 427 carjackings in 2022, according to data provided on the City of Memphis’ data hub, a 40% increase from 305 carjackings in 2021. There were 288 carjacking incidents in 2020 and 300 in 2019, and there have been 59 so far this year as of March 3.
• There were 9,834 thefts from automobiles in 2022, also according to the city’s data hub, a 29.5% increase from 7,594 thefts from vehicles in 2021. There were 7,289 thefts from vehicles in 2020 and 7,080 in 2019, and there have been 2,057 so far this year as of March 7.
• As of Feb. 21, there had been 1,994 car thefts in 2023, a 139% increase from the same date in 2022, according to information the Memphis Police Department provided to the Memphis City Council during a recent committee meeting. During all of 2022, 11,021 car thefts were reported; in 2021, that number was 4,999, according to MPD statistics.
• At the February city council meeting, MPD officials said juveniles make up 38% of those arrested for auto thefts. More 15-year-olds have been arrested for auto theft so far in 2023 than any other age group.
• Guns are most certainly being stolen at a higher clip: In 2022, according to figures from Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, 2,441 guns were reported stolen from vehicles compared to 2,042 in 2021 (a 19% increase) and 287 in 2011 (a 750% increase).

Crime and punishment

Just seven months before allegedly killing Rev. Autura Eason-Williams in July 2022 during an attempted carjacking in her Whitehaven driveway, suspect Miguel Andrade was allegedly involved in other carjackings. In December of the previous year, the then-14-year-old Andrade was charged with three counts of carjacking and three counts of possession/employment of a firearm during the commission of a felony.

Andrade was transferred from juvenile court to adult court this January for his alleged role in Eason-Williams’ death. In February, he posted a $200,000 bond and was released. 

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He does not yet have an arraignment or trial date. 

If a minor suspect is placed in detention after being charged with a crime, they are often back out on the streets the next day, according to Garrett O’Brien, a former MPD Auto Theft Task Force officer.

“I have arrested a kid in the same week or two,” O’Brien said. “I mean for serious charges – auto theft, evading, fighting with guns. It’s not an uncommon thing.”

O’Brien said part of the issue that leads these children to reoffend is the fact that they often do not have bonds set for them. 

“We’d go arrest somebody that’s 18 years old, and he’d get a $1,000 or $2,000 bond,” O’Brien said. “He’s out for 100 or 200 bucks, if even that. And the juvenile that he’s with, they get out for nothing. And they’re out doing the same thing the following day.”

The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office and the Shelby County Juvenile Court use a Detention Assessment Tool, which was one of the results of a 2012 U.S. Department of Justice oversight period that ended in 2018.

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If the individual has a “DAT” score of 19 or higher, they are placed in detention. Typically, a juvenile must be accused of a violent crime that resulted in an injury for their score to be high enough for them to be placed in detention. Otherwise, they are issued a summons. 

Cara Suvall, assistant clinical professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School, said, in general, the criminal legal system does not do much to deter young offenders from committing crimes, especially when their brains are not yet developed enough for them to comprehend or care about consequences. 

“So the point of somebody saying, ‘I think I’m going to carjack somebody, but maybe I won’t, because, you know, I’m expecting X or Y consequence,’” Suvall said. “I’m skeptical of it for adults, as well. But I am much more skeptical of it for youth.” 

In terms of why a minor might commit a crime, Suvall said teenagers are easily swayed by peer pressure.

“It’s pretty rare that it’s a single teenager acting alone,” she said. “And it’s because again, they’re at a stage developmentally, where they’re really wired to feed into sort of peer dynamics in a way that they weren’t before and that they won’t be in the future.”

Reasons behind the rise? 

At a recent committee meeting, city council members also asked MPD Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis if she thought juvenile car thefts and break-ins were potentially being coordinated by adults as part of an organized theft ring.

“I would say somewhat,” Davis replied. “It’s almost a dare or something. … They are finding it easy to do.” 

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“We’ll call them gangs like an organized gang, but they’ll clique up, so to speak, and go out and commit these acts for fun,” said MPD’s Deputy Chief of Special Operations Stephen Chandler during a March 2 interview. 

O’Brien, the former MPD task force officer, said groups of juveniles committing crimes may avoid calling themselves “gangs.”

“You’ll have four or five kids and the car — two or three of them might be in the same, they call it a ‘gang’, ‘clique,’ ‘get together,’” O’Brien said. “They’ll call it different names. For lack of better terms, it’s a gang.”

Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner Jr. thinks some of the juvenile suspects involved in crimes could be part of gangs but he also thinks some of them act out of need. 

“You have those juveniles that are out creating delinquent acts on their own. … It could be a lot of underlying reasons,” Bonner said. “I talk to kids who are in detention, and they’re talking about, ‘I’m trying to feed my mom, feed the family,’ and things like that, or, ‘I’m trying to get clothes.’”

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Social media also may play a role. Videos have emerged on social media in recent years showing youth how to steal certain Kias and Hyundais by popping the steering wheel column off and starting the car with a USB plug. 

“There is so much information out there where these kids can go and find these things on the Internet,” Bonner said. “Our challenge is to monitor it, watch them, talk to them and try to find a better way for them to exist.”

From the victims’ perspectives

The same February day Bambrick was carjacked, Alex Canale pulled into his mother’s driveway in Chickasaw Gardens to check on her dog. Before he could get out, two masked individuals — some of the same people allegedly involved in Bambrick’s carjacking — ran up to his car. 

Canale put his car into reverse and sped out of the driveway. The suspects then ran back to their vehicle, jumped in and drove off after Canale, firing shots into his vehicle. Canale was uninjured. 

“I don’t care if anybody takes my car. That’s replaceable,” Canale said. “My life is not replaceable. And so, I decided that I was going to be the one that wrote the script of the story.”

Canale, who owns D. Canale & Co., the parent company for Old Dominick Distillery, later learned four juveniles were arrested in his attempted carjacking.

Two of those individuals were charged with attempted second-degree murder and were released from juvenile court with ankle monitors, according to Canale. Another juvenile with unknown charges was detained; the fourth was released on a lesser charge.

According to Bambrick, six juveniles between the ages of 14 and 17 were arrested in connection to her carjacking. But, she said, only two of them ultimately received criminal charges. 

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“First and foremost, I am my children’s advocate, and I want to do everything I can, always, to make sure that they feel safe and secure. Their sense of security was taken from them,” Bambrick said. “But I also feel so much sadness for the kids that did this to us.”

Although Canale has received updates from a victim/witness coordinator with the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office in his case, Bambrick said she has not. 

 The two have connected since some of the suspects in their cases are the same. 

Canale also has rallied a group of business leaders who have offered help to city leaders. 

“Having been in a family business that’s been here for 157 years, we can survive Yellow Fever two times,” Canale said. “We can survive pandemics. Those are all uncontrollable, but survivable, aspects. We cannot survive crime. And it’s controllable. So let’s control it and survive.”