A Chicago woman of forty and her co-worker escaped alive from a violent attempted carjacking in the early hours of Dec. 27th when her colleague produced his firearm and fought off the assailant.
Jaquita Sims had suffered a flat tire according to Fox News when her co-worker, a 65-year-old man, offered to pick her up from her disabled vehicle on Chicago’s West Side near West Garfield Park. According to Fox News, Sims had been on her way to O’Hare International Airport as her mother told reporters.
Janice Sims described the aftermath of the attack on her daughter to CBS News.
“If you see all those bullet holes and only one hit my child. That’s a miracle.” She added, “Angels covered her. God covered my daughter. Thank you, Lord.”
Reportedly four men approached the vehicle Jaquita and her co-worker were in at about 4:40 a.m., weapons drawn at the pair, and demanded they exit the vehicle. She described the moment to the Chicago-Sun Times, “I started screaming my coworker’s name out.”
The gunfight began when Sims’ colleague drew his own sidearm, and expended all five rounds he had to fight off the attackers who in turn riddled the vehicle with at least twenty shots.
“They wanted to carjack them,” Sims said. “They just shot the car up maybe 20 times.”
The attackers fled, but Sims had taken a gunshot wound to the chest and her colleague had suffered a grazing injury to his thigh. He drove them both to a nearby hospital. Sims described losing consciousness with her co-worker screaming her name, and her being unable to answer.
Chicago Police told the Sun-Times that the assailants opened fire after Sims’ colleague fired and missed, but that isn’t how she remembers it. She told reporters that her attackers opened fire as soon as they saw her co-worker draw his weapon. He reportedly holds both a concealed-carry license and a valid FOID card, the police said.
The outlet reported that doctors were unable the bullet from Sims’, and she will continue to carry it in her breast— doing so would cause more damage to her body.
“I don’t bother nobody, I’m a good person, I go to church,” Sims told reporters. “I go to work, and I make a living for my family, and that’s it.” Her family constantly checks to see if she is still breathing she said, adding that she is still in shock and has experienced flashbacks of the attack.
“My mom and my sister have to help me in and out [of] the bed, they have to feed me. … They have to do everything for me because my right arm is not working,” Sims explained. “I can’t work, I can’t do nothing. They took a lot from me.”
Though she hasn’t spoken to her heroic co-worker Jaquita told the Sun-Times that she was told by her sister he was “doing OK and was just shaken up and scared to go to work.”
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