A jury in U.S. District Court on Wednesday convicted a man from Ferguson, Missouri of a felony charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Due to a series of prior convictions for violent offenses, Anthony Willis, 29, now faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison as an armed career criminal.
Willis was found guilty Wednesday after a trial lasting less than two days.
On July 19, 2021, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department officers saw a Hyundai Elantra fail to stop at a stop sign in the Wells Goodfellow neighborhood and tried to pull the car over. Willis instead sped up and ran through another stop sign before other officers used spike strips to deflate his tires. Willis kept going until he hit another vehicle at Goodfellow and Natural bridge. He then ran away but was caught a short distance away. He’d left a loaded Glock handgun in the car.
As a convicted felon, Willis is barred from possessing a firearm. Willis was convicted of the 2010 robbery of a Del Taco in St. Louis and the robbery of a Popeye’s Chicken manager in St. Louis County on two occasions in 2010.
Willis is scheduled to be sentenced on March 15.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matthew Martin and Donald Boyce are prosecuting the case.
