A man who fired several rounds from a handgun at a house after a dispute with its occupants was sentenced yesterday to two and a half years in federal prison.
Marcus Wilson, age 24, from Carbondale, Illinois, received the prison term after a Jan. 15, 2015, guilty plea to possession of a firearm as an unlawful drug user.
In a plea agreement, Wilson admitted that on May 8, 2014, he purchased a.40 caliber handgun and ammunition from a Cedar Rapids gun shop. In purchasing the firearm, Wilson lied on the background check paperwork, falsely claiming that he was not an unlawful user of controlled substances. In fact, Wilson had been unlawfully using cocaine, marijuana, and PCP for at least three years prior to the purchase. The day after Wilson purchased the handgun, he visited a girlfriend at her friend’s home in Cedar Rapids, where Wilson got into a verbal altercation with the occupants of the home. When forced to leave the home, Wilson pulled out his handgun and wildly fired several rounds at the home, hitting it and a neighboring house. Both homes were occupied, including by children, and at least one round penetrated the exterior wall of a home. When police arrived moments later in response to the gunfire and found Wilson outside the home, he falsely claimed he had been shot at by occupants of the home. This compelled the police to remove the occupants at gunpoint only to discover that Wilson had lied to them.
Wilson was sentenced in Cedar Rapids by United States District Court Chief Judge Linda R. Reade. Wilson was sentenced to thirty months’ imprisonment. A special assessment of $100 was imposed. He must also serve a three-year term of supervised release after the prison term. There is no parole in the federal system. Wilson is being held in the United States Marshal’s custody until he can be transported to a federal prison.
The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney C.J. Williams and investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cedar Rapids Police Department as part of the FBI Safe Streets Taskforce, a unit focused on ending gun violence in the Northern District of Iowa.
Court file information is available at https://ecf.iand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl. The case file number is 14-CR-0083.
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Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the United States Attorneys
