There’s a particular breed of criminal decision-making on display in Humboldt Park, and it belongs to two men who allegedly stole a car at gunpoint and then concluded that the natural next step was to sell it back to the person they stole it from — in the same alley, a few hours later, in a neighborhood actively patrolled by Chicago police. Predictably, it did not go well.
According to a Chicago Police Department report and the prosecutors’ detention petition, the trouble started around 3 a.m. on June 28 in the alley behind the 900 block of North Central Park Avenue. A 23-year-old man was sitting in his car with his brother when 35-year-old Trevail Tyree walked up to the driver’s door with a handgun while 38-year-old William Tanksley went to the passenger side and started yanking the brother by the arm to drag him out. When the driver refused to let that happen, police say Tyree fired a round into the dashboard. Both brothers bailed, and the two men drove off in the car.
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Here’s where it curdles from armed robbery into farce. Less than three hours later, the pair allegedly called one of the brothers — using the other brother’s stolen phone, which tells you roughly the level of planning involved here — and offered to hand the car back for cash. They agreed to meet in the same alley where the whole thing started. As the money-for-car swap was happening around 5:30 a.m., one of the victims spotted two CPD squad cars nearby and flagged them down. Officers returned the keys to the owner and arrested both men, who are now sitting in Cook County jail.
If the “sell the car back” part sounds oddly specific, that’s because it’s a known play. A specific stolen vehicle is a liability: it’s on a hot sheet, its plates are flagged, and chopping or exporting it takes infrastructure most street-level offenders don’t have. Ransoming it back to a panicked owner who just wants their car and their belongings is faster money with no fence required. The bet is that the victim would rather quietly pay than deal with an insurance claim, a rental, and a police report. It’s extortion dressed up as customer service, and it works often enough that people keep trying it.
The car-owner takeaway is the useful part. If someone contacts you offering to return your stolen vehicle for money, that is not a transaction — it’s a second crime in progress, and the correct response is to loop in police rather than show up with an envelope of cash. Paying a ransom gets you nothing back from your insurer; comprehensive coverage handles theft, including carjacking, but it does not reimburse money you voluntarily hand to the people who took the car. Negotiating in person with someone who has already fired a gun is its own obvious hazard.
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There’s also a hardware footnote worth flagging. The keys went with the car, which means these two had a working fob and full access for the entire time they had it. Anyone who recovers a vehicle this way should treat it as compromised: reprogram or replace the fob, and give the interior a look for any tracking device that could let someone find it again later. Modern connected-car services — factory apps with live location, stolen-vehicle assistance that can help police pinpoint or slow a car — are one of the few features that genuinely earn their keep in exactly this scenario, and the fact that the suspects were reduced to negotiating over a stolen phone suggests they weren’t worried about being tracked. They should have been.
Legally, the two are looking at serious exposure. Under 720 ILCS 5/18-4, aggravated vehicular hijacking is a Class X felony — the most severe category in Illinois short of murder — carrying six to 30 years with no possibility of probation. The statute adds 15 years when the offender is armed with a firearm and 20 years when the offender personally discharges one. That shot into the dashboard isn’t a minor detail; it’s the fact that pushes this from a bad case into a much worse one. Each man is charged with two counts, and Tanksley faces an additional felony cannabis-delivery count on top of it.
The plan required almost nothing to go right, and it didn’t.