Victim's Random Search Lands Carjackers Back Behind Bars

If Brittany Guerriero hadn't checked out their status, authorities wouldn't have known
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Feb 13, 2017 11:59 AM CST

Two Detroit carjackers are back in prison after their victim went online and found they'd been mistakenly released, the AP reports. Local and federal authorities are pointing fingers at each other—but there's no dispute that Brittany Guerriero is the person who had to get her own justice. The men were free for months until December. Per the Detroit Free Press, Guerriero was moving into a new apartment in September 2014 when she was carjacked while waiting in the valet line. Thanks to surveillance camera tapes and Guerriero's testimony, Kendall Kelly and DeMarcus Catlin were captured, and each received sentences of nine to 20 years in prison on the carjacking charge (Kelly had other time added on for a fatal shooting).

But Guerriero tells the Detroit Free Press that she went online in November and found Kelly and Catlin had been released from federal prison. They were sent there first because their carjacking convictions in state court violated their probation. Kelly and Catlin were supposed to go to a Michigan prison last year to serve their carjacking sentences, but the US Bureau of Prisons says it wasn't told that the men were supposed to be transferred. A rep for the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office says the snafu was the federal prison bureau's fault, but the feds deny any wrongdoing and say the proper detainer paperwork wasn't filed to alert them that the convicts shouldn't have been released. "It shouldn't take some random victim looking through the system," Guerriero says. "Who else have they accidentally released?" (More carjacking stories.)

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