A Chicago Cop Killed Someone in a Car Accident. They Blamed a 20-Year-Old Instead.

This piece was published in partnership with the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab and Chicago Reader.

Timothy Jones wasn’t supposed to be home for long. Nearing the end of his first year at Lincoln University in Missouri in 2013, Jones, a 6’1” student with a close-shorn beard and almond-shaped eyes, realized he needed a break before summer classes began, so he decided to return to his hometown of Chicago for a few weeks. 

While there, Jones and a friend, Tremaine Scott, went to visit another man named Lee Davis, whom the pair knew from high school. Davis had racked up a $7,000 debt to the duo. Jones and Scott came to Davis’s South Side apartment door looking to collect. 

According to transcripts from a later trial, Jones, Scott, and a third friend named Johnny visited Davis’s apartment complex the night of May 7, 2013. Davis claimed he didn’t have the money but would the next day. So, the following morning, the trio returned to the building, went through the entrance, passed by Davis’s girlfriend as she exited, and came upon Davis’s door. Jones and Scott entered, asking where their money was. Johnny waited behind in the car.

According to Jones, Scott and Davis started arguing. After Jones went to grab a wad of cash Davis said he kept in his bedroom, Davis’s demeanor shifted, and he said he was going to get his gun. Jones and Scott sprinted out of the building to find that Davis’s girlfriend had called the Chicago Police Department. 

The duo ran down Ellis Avenue and through a park to get to where Johnny had moved their car. Jones later testified that the group took off with Johnny in the driver’s seat. Officer Ronald Pittman pursued. The trio crashed into a parked car a few blocks down. There, Pittman pulled his gun on the three. Scott and Johnny ran in opposite directions, giving Jones time to get back in the car and drive away.

Officer James Sivicek, who was on patrol and had just gotten a call about a burglary in progress, saw Jones’s car speed by with another police vehicle in pursuit. Sivicek decided to follow. Jones then blew through a red light at 76th and Yates. About seven seconds later, Sivicek did the same. As the cop crossed into the intersection, he careened toward a blue Pontiac. 

“I remember that I saw the car maybe a second or two before the impact,” Officer Sivicek later said in trial testimony. “I remember pushing on the brake as hard as I could. And it felt like an eternity.” 

Sivicek’s squad car rammed into the passenger side of the Pontiac, killing the driver, Jacqueline Reynolds.

Jones didn’t see the crash and thought he’d lost the police. He pulled over a few blocks later and left the car to try to blend into his surroundings. Scores of police cars swarmed the neighborhood. One officer detained Jones after claiming Jones’s shoes matched the description of a burglary suspect Davis and his girlfriend described. The officer then returned Jones to the apartments, where Davis identified Jones as a suspect. The police took Jones in for questioning.

At the station, a homicide detective told Jones that someone had died during the pursuit and that police were investigating Jones as a result. 

I’m 1000% sure nobody died, Jones says he thought. Y’all got to have the wrong person. Y’all have to have the wrong person. 

Two days later, Jones appeared in court, where a judge told him he was being charged with murder for Jacqueline Reynolds’ death. He was ultimately sentenced to 28 years in prison for a killing he did not commit. When his trial ended, he was only 22 years old.

Jones was held liable for Reynolds’ death under the state’s felony murder rule, which allows an individual to be charged with murder if a death—even an unintentional one, not at the defendant’s hand—occurs during the commission of certain felonies.

At the time of Reynolds’ death, the felony murder statute in Illinois allowed people like Jones to be convicted of murder so long as the prosecution proved they committed a “forcible felony,” like burglary, arson, or kidnapping. This idea—that a person could be held responsible for a killing they did not commit—has centuries of precedent and was at one point enshrined in law across continents. However, most countries have now removed the felony murder rule from their books. In its current form, the rule has created a crisis of racial injustice, incarcerating young Black people at startlingly disproportionate rates. 

Today, America stands alone as the only common-law nation that still uses felony murder. More than 40 states have some version of the law on their books. In many states, the law has expanded both in scope and use. Because many states don’t keep data on felony murder charges and convictions, the exact extent to which felony murder statutes are used remains unknown. However, the Felony Murder Reporting Project—a data hub created by New Yorker journalist Sarah Stillman and Yale University Reporting Lab students—has collected information on over 10,000 cases. (This reporter is a part of the project.)

In March 2023, The Appeal investigated the Phoenix Police Department’s killing of then-19-year-old Jacob Harris, whose three young friends were later imprisoned for his death under that state’s felony murder statute. And, in July 2023, The Appeal chronicled how Missouri overwhelmingly and disproportionately levies felony murder charges against Black people.

In Cook County, where Chicago is located, 82 percent of people incarcerated for felony murder are Black, even though Black people only make up 23 percent of the county’s population, according to data from the Felony Murder Reporting Project. Across the state, Black people are more than 23 times more likely to be incarcerated for felony murder than white people, even when adjusting for Illinois’ demographics. Because the law carries a minimum sentence of 20 years and can be extended to natural life, felony murder has clawed away decades from the lives of Black Illinoians. 

Beyond sentencing, prosecutors often use felony murder charges to pressure people to accept plea deals. Research done by Georgia State University professor Kat Albrecht found that about 59 percent of felony murder charges brought in Cook County are later dropped. When asked about this high rate of bad charges, Albrecht told The Appeal that since Cook County is one of the country’s largest and most powerful criminal legal systems, prosecutors have a strong incentive to stack on extra charges “to get people to plead to the underlying felony.” 

In 2021, the Illinois state legislature passed the SAFE-T Act, which prevents the state from using the felony murder statute in cases similar to Jones’s. (The law can still be applied in certain circumstances, such as when an accomplice kills someone.) However, the SAFE-T Act’s reforms did not apply retroactively, so Jones and many others like him remain imprisoned for something no longer considered a crime. 

Jones’s chance to walk free now hinges on a clemency petition he submitted to the state’s Prisoner Review Board in April. His case and his attempt to seek redress for his conviction have raised a question that sits at the heart of many legal system reforms: Should people remain incarcerated for laws now deemed unjust?

Jones grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago’s South Side. When Jones was six, his mom, struggling with finances, moved him and his sister from the projects to Minnesota. For the next few years, Jones’s family moved between cities and homeless shelters, often before he could get fully settled. 

“Somehow in [my mom’s] mind, starting over was always the key, and so we would always move because she was starting over,” Jones told The Appeal. He speaks deliberately, taking time to sift through his memories and find the precise words to describe his life.

Jones moved back to Chicago in seventh grade to live with his aunt. A few years later, he enrolled in Simeon Career Academy, a vocational high school on the city’s South Side. Jones was a strong student. He played on a powerhouse varsity football team, served on the student council, and participated in Business Professionals of America. He developed an affinity for math and moved on to Lincoln University, where he studied accounting. But his ambitions were put on hold after his arrest. (Jones’s case was also the subject of a 2020 episode of the popular podcast Criminal.)

As Jones’s case progressed toward trial, the family of Jacqueline Reynolds, the woman who was killed in the police chase, filed a wrongful death suit against the Chicago Police Department. According to ABC7, the family wanted prosecutors to drop their charges against Jones. Instead, the Reynolds family alleged that Officer Sivicek had violated the department’s vehicle-chase policy and was thus the person responsible for Reynolds’ death. 

That policy stipulates that officers should not pursue suspects when conditions fail a balancing test, where “the danger to the public or officer created by the pursuit exceeds the danger presented by the offender remaining at large.” 

According to the Police Department’s Traffic Review Board, which reviews pursuits that cause major property damage or injury, Sivicek failed that test. According to the Chicago Tribune, Sivicek was only reprimanded and told to attend driving school.

In 2017, a county court sided with the Reynolds estate and found the City of Chicago and Sivicek liable for Jacqueline’s death, awarding Reynolds’ family $3.5 million in damages. The Appeal could not reach Reynolds’ family for comment.

By that time, however, Jones’s trial had come and gone. On February 21, 2015, a jury reached a guilty verdict in 7 hours. Judge Thaddeus Wilson revoked Jones’s bond, and he was taken to await sentencing behind bars.

At sentencing, Judge Wilson called Jones “a colossal waste.”

“You’re a smart guy; a dumb crook,” the judge said. “And every time you were caught and pointed out to be a dumb crook, you continued. You upped the ante. Maybe you were a good son, a good boyfriend, a good friend, but a horrible citizen.” 

The judge gave Jones 28 years.

The effort to reform felony murder in Illinois primarily grew out of the 2019 “Lake County 5” case, in which five teenagers were charged with felony murder for the death of their 14-year-old family member, who was killed by a man they’d all been trying to rob. At the time, Restore Justice, a legal reform advocacy organization, was one of the only groups working on the issue of felony murder. That was thanks largely to Marshan Allen, who was incarcerated on a felony murder charge as a kid, spent nearly 25 years in prison for a killing someone else committed, and began working with Restore Justice once he was released. 

Allen and the rest of Restore Justice had taken the momentum from the case straight to Springfield and lobbied for a bill to narrow the felony murder statute. Allen quickly realized just how little legislators knew about felony murder. 

“Once we explained it to them[…]they were shocked,” Allen said.

Lawmakers ultimately incorporated a version of Restore Justice’s bill into the SAFE-T Act despite pandemic delays and opposition from prosecutor’s offices. But, like many of Illinois’s previous legal reforms, the law was not applied retroactively. 

Restore Justice’s executive director, Wendell Robinson, told The Appeal that he wishes the law went further.

“If we can deem something wrong today, why wasn’t it wrong yesterday?” Robinson asked.

Allen echoed this point. In his view, legislators often object to retroactivity because they feel they’d promised victims’ families that the accused would serve time for their crimes. Prosecutors’ offices often oppose retroactivity because they believe it would be unfeasible to recollect evidence and reorganize witnesses to retry cases. And courts often fight the changes because they fear the new rules may worsen backlogs in an already-stressed system. 

Caitlin Glass, a Boston University law professor who researches felony murder, told The Appeal that critics often use these arguments to shut down conversations about reform. 

“The idea that someone is gonna die in prison for something that we are saying is no longer the law is unconscionable,” she said. She pointed to California and Minnesota as examples of states that have applied felony murder reform retroactively, despite feasibility concerns. 

“It can be done,” she added. “It’s not impossible. Justice requires doing this.”

In Nov. 2022, the Illinois Prison Project, a nonprofit legal aid group, became involved in Jones’s case. In April of this year, they filed a clemency petition requesting that the state reduce Jones’s sentence to time served. On July 8, Jones and his legal team went before Illinois’ Prisoner Review Board, where, according to his lawyer, Sarah Free, they had less than 15 minutes to make the case for Jones’s release. 

Jones was allowed only four people to testify on his behalf: Free; his godmother Carmen Hatch; a recently exonerated man whom knew Jones from prison named Brian Beals; and Cheryl Benson, who read a statement on behalf of a therapist who promised to offer Jones pro-bono counseling once he’s released. 

The Review Board will take up to sixty days to draft and submit their recommendation to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who, according to the Board’s website, “is not under any deadline to respond to the petition.” In the absence of retroactive reform, this is the last avenue for Jones to immediately regain his freedom. In Free’s experience with other cases, though, it has taken several years to receive a response from the Governor.

In the meantime, Jones spends his time reading and wondering what the rest of his life will look like. 

“I’m ready to come home,” Jones said with a soft laugh. “I’m just really looking forward to what the adult version of me is going to be like,” he shared. He’s excited to get his first apartment, his first car, and his first job. 

“I’ve been thinking about that every day,” he said. “Every single day.”