How to solve a carjacking spree: Unit of Cuyahoga prosecutor’s office connects detectives, evidence to track suspects

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CLEVELAND, Ohio – When Mike Asbury, a Rocky River police detective, arrived to work on Aug. 18, his boss handed him a pressing case: Overnight, a woman at a gas station was struck in the head with a rifle, and the assailants fled in her car.

Reading the details, Asbury wondered if it was an isolated case. From his years in law enforcement, he knew carjackers often committed heists in spurts, sometimes in far-flung corners of a metro region.

Connecting one to another posed a dizzying challenge for any single law enforcement officer in Cuyahoga County, a swath of nearly 60 municipalities that is larger than Rhode Island in size and population. But Asbury had a tool at his disposal, which informed his next step. He typed out a bulletin, linked it to surveillance footage and sent it to a specialized outfit run by Cuyahoga County prosecutors called the Crime Strategies Unit, or CSU.

During a typical investigation, a police agency builds a case on its own. Prosecutors, who come in later, rely on that evidence when they present the case to a grand jury.

The CSU concept, born in New York in 2010 before proliferating across the country, allows prosecutors and detectives from different jurisdictions to collect evidence in tandem, starting on Day 1 of an investigation. Such complex cases often focus on broader trends and pattern crimes, possibly committed by single suspects or crews across municipalities.

The details that Asbury sent to the unit — which were automatically blasted to police agencies across the county — were horrific. A woman emerged from her Audi Q7 at a gas station, where two men wearing masks and surgical gloves chased her toward the street. One struck her with an AK-47-style rifle, dropping her to the ground, and both assailants began kicking her, according to the police report. They took her purse and fled in the Audi, while a third man sped away in the Honda CR-V that they had arrived in. Responding officers found the woman bleeding from the head.

In his bulletin, Asbury posed a question: Does anyone recognize these suspects or crime elements?

The next day, he got a message from a Cleveland Heights detective, reporting an overnight carjacking in that city. A woman at a gas station had been struck in the head with a rifle.

To Asbury, it didn’t seem like a coincidence.

The detectives’ exchange kicked off a wider investigation by the unit that culminated last month, when a Cuyahoga County grand jury indicted three men under Ohio’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. It alleges a pattern of corruption — a heavy hammer originally designed to go after the mob. The defendants are accused of committing six carjackings in four cities in a two-day span.

A specialized unit

Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Ryan Bokoch joined Cuyahoga County’s CSU in 2015, when it launched as an outgrowth of a serial smash-and-grab case. He became supervisor in 2021. He enjoys diving into investigations as soon as they break, rolling up his sleeves like a detective.

“If a case involves 30 incidents, we need a prosecutor on that from the beginning, not dumped on someone’s lap leading up to grand jury,” he explained.

Bokoch’s team investigates robberies, shootings and gun recoveries. To establish patterns, the members look for recurring details: Maybe convenience stores across the county were robbed by a man wearing a lime green hoodie, or perhaps identical bullet casings were found in the same two neighborhoods multiple times.

In addition to five prosecutors, the unit is staffed by five analysts with access to police data and other investigative tools. The analysts can create visuals that show, for example, the path of a suspect’s phone as it pings multiple cell towers.

Since its inception in 2010, the CSU model remains one of the most innovative approaches to modern-day prosecuting, according to Kristine Hamann, the director of the New York-based Prosecutors’ Center for Excellence. Hamann was a prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office when it developed the first unit and she now works with CSUs across the country.

“The classic complaint is that something comes in from police, and it’s half-baked and prosecutors want more,” said Hamann. “A CSU is the perfect place to pull in leads and prioritize.”

Hamann recently co-authored a report highlighting the work of several CSUs, including Cuyahoga County’s, which she called “a gold standard.”

Not every unit is the same. Cuyahoga County distinguishes itself by its myriad law enforcement agencies —more than 70, said Bokoch — presenting a unique challenge.

Cuyahoga County is home to nearly 60 municipalities. “Our biggest problem is, How do all of these law enforcement agencies deal with one another?” said Ryan Bokoch, an assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor who oversees the Crime Strategies Unit. (Photo: John Tucker)

Independence Detective Andrew March uses an example of credit card thefts at local restaurants as a reason to deploy the CSU as a hub. “I’d want to know if they’re hitting other areas, and I might call Brecksville or Parma, but I’d never think to call Avon,” he said. “But these criminals will go all over the place. They’ll go to Sandusky if they have to.”

One crime commonly funneled through CSUs is carjacking, an offense that spiked in several major U.S. cities during the pandemic. Stubbornly difficult to solve, they’re often committed by masked assailants who blindside victims under the cloak of night. Local concern peaked with the death of Shane Bartek, an off-duty Cleveland police officer fatally shot by an 18-year-old woman during a New Year’s Eve carjacking in 2021.

As carjackings increased, so did the cases landing on Bokoch’s desk. His team quickly learned to spot telltale signs of patterns. One crew induced victims out of their cars by bumping into them with their own, he said. Another serial case involved a 14-year-old girl who targeted Uber and Lyft drivers.

Recently, prosecutors have been inundated with questions about how many carjackings result in criminal charges. Historically, such questions have been difficult to answer, since that crime is not defined by Ohio statutes. Instead, police classify carjacking as aggravated robbery, grand theft-motor vehicle or, most accurately, both, Bokoch says.

A cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer records request sent last year to the Cleveland Division of Police exemplifies that problem. It requested annual tallies of incidents categorized as both aggravated robberies and grand theft-motor vehicle. The city responded with a document that erroneously suggested carjackings were decreasing dramatically over the last few years.

Acknowledging that police do not keep good data, Bokoch and his team recently addressed the issue. Beginning in January of last year, defendants charged in Cuyahoga County for what looks like carjacking — the combination of robbery and car theft — receive a special stamp in their file.

With a year’s worth of data, Bokoch’s team analyzed the number of carjackings in the county that resulted in prosecutions last year: a total of 66. Of those, about 75% occurred in Cleveland. Juveniles made up about half of the defendants; nearly 90% were committed with a gun, compared to the national rate of about 38%, according to a recent Department of Justice study.

Several defendants were charged with multiple carjackings and attempts. One was accused of six, the highest number in Bokoch’s data.

Those crimes occurred last August, and they ran through Rocky River.

A case builds

The first thing Audreana Salter noticed was the gun.

The Cleveland Heights detective was at her desk, peering over the Rocky River surveillance footage that Asbury sent the previous day through the Crime Strategies Unit. She compared it with her own footage, collected overnight after a carjacking at a Cleveland Heights gas station. In both cases, one of the assailants used the barrel of an AK 47-style rifle to hit a woman in the head.

“We have lot of robberies, but we don’t have a lot of robberies where AK-47s are used to strike victims,” Salter recalled. “That was when the light bulb went off.”

In her case, a woman entered the gas station and purchased some snacks. When she returned, a masked rifleman emerged from behind the pumps and pushed her to the ground. A second man aimed a pistol at her, demanding keys.

As the victim pleaded for mercy, the rifleman pulled back her ponytail and struck her face with the gun, according to the police report. One attacker sped off in her car, which contained her phone and laptop, while the other fled in the vehicle in which they had arrived. Responding officers found the victim behind the store counter, bleeding from her forehead.

Salter sent her surveillance to Asbury, who studied it. The Cleveland Heights attackers arrived in a Ford Fusion—not a CR-V as they did in Rocky River. But Asbury knew carjackers often use one hot car to steal another.

Shortly later, Asbury got a message from March, the Independence detective, in response to his CSU alert. In the hours between the Rocky River and Cleveland Heights incidents, rifle-toting assailants had robbed a 62-year-old man of his car at an Independence gas station. They’d arrived in a Ford Fusion that was stolen shortly beforehand in Garfield Heights, according to a police report.

“I was like, OK, we’re onto something bigger than just one here,” Asbury recalled.

Suddenly, another tip came in, this time from a Cleveland detective. Hours before the Rocky River carjacking, two women, 64 and 73, were confronted on the city’s East Side by a gunman, who stole their CR-V and fled alongside another car. One victim said she felt the assailant’s gun touch her nose, the police report stated.

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office

A CSU prosecutor convened a meeting with the detectives at the unit’s downtown offices, the first of several they would have in the next few weeks to trade intelligence, manage workflow and prevent duplicate warrants.

As the investigation ramped up, authorities recovered an abandoned CR-V and confirmed that it was stolen from the Cleveland victims, then used in the Rocky River crime. Police also recovered the Rocky River victim’s abandoned Audi, mechanically inoperable.

Asbury zeroed in on a suspect named Treveon Jones, then 18, who lived in Cleveland’s Collinwood-Nottingham neighborhood, after linking evidence from the Audi to Jones and collecting other evidence he declined to divulge.

Asbury and Salter launched a surveillance operation, spending hours together. They tailed Jones on the street, combed through camera footage and digital apps and established three locations where Jones was known to frequent. “She was like my partner,” Asbury said.

The work weighed on the investigators. Asbury was angered by the pistol-whippings; Salter said that her victim’s trauma fueled her with extra motivation for justice.

According to social worker Eileen Zatta, who has worked with carjacking victims in her career, the trauma it entails is unique.

“One minute you are getting in your car after loading groceries, the next minute you fear your life might end,” said Zatta, a program manager for Cleveland-based FrontLine Service, a leading provider of trauma counseling statewide. In the aftermath, victims might replay the incident in their heads, lose trust in certain people or places, or contend with the possibility the assailant knows where they live based on materials inside the car.

The 62-year-old Independence victim, who asked not to be named, said the experience left him shaken. “My wife and children don’t want me to come to work early in the morning,” he said. “I will never feel the same way while doing something as basic as putting gas in my car.”

Though he wasn’t physically assaulted, he feels for the women who were. “I can’t imagine their pain,” he said.

“A pattern of corruption”

On Aug. 30, 12 days after the Rocky River attack, a multiagency arrest team and SWAT unit descended on a Cleveland home with a search warrant obtained by Asbury. Jones, who was inside a car parked in the driveway, took off on foot, but he was captured 10 minutes later after Salter spotted him running in the distance, recounted Asbury, who cuffed the suspect himself.

During an interview with Asbury, Jones confessed to being involved in aggravated robberies, according to a Cleveland Heights police affidavit.

Authorities searched Jones’ home and found the Cleveland Heights victim’s car key, along with the rifle, clothing and shoes Jones used during that robbery, the affidavit said.

Asbury also seized Jones’ phone, which he and Salter used, along with other evidence, to connect two additional men to the carjackings, he said. Their names were Jaahdarion Louis-Jones, then 19, and Anthony Evans, then 20.

Jones was arrested on his mother’s porch, and Evans was arrested at MetroHealth Medical Center, where he was expecting the birth of a child, Asbury said.

Last month, a grand jury returned a superseding 32-count indictment that accused each defendant of engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity. It’s the first time in recent history prosecutors have wielded RICO charges against an alleged carjacking enterprise, Bokoch said. The men are accused of carrying out the robberies in Rocky River, Cleveland Heights, Independence and Cleveland.

“Crime does not stop at any jurisdictional border,” Prosecutor Michael O’Malley said in a press release announcing the indictment.

Each defendant is being held on a $150,000 bond. A trial date has not been set. Attorneys for Jones and Louis-Jones did not respond to messages. Evans’ lawyer referred questions to Cuyahoga County Chief Public Defender Cullen Sweeney. He said that while his office generally doesn’t comment on pending cases, it will “vigorously” defend Evans.

As the case works its way through the courthouse, the detectives credit the CSU for making the investigation possible.

“Cleveland Heights is a little ways from Rocky River,” said Salter. “If it wasn’t for the Crime Strategies Unit, I probably wouldn’t know Detective Asbury to this day.”

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