U.S. District Judge Rodney W. Sippel on Friday sentenced a man from Cahokia, Illinois to 46 months in prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm on two separate occasions.
Freddie Tilmon, 31, pleaded guilty on June 7 to two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm. He admitted that he and his co-defendant, Tishonda Turner, 32, of St. Louis County, went to a St. Louis County gun store on August 8, 2020, and spent $3,984 on three guns, ammunition, and accessories. Tilmon told Turner what to buy.
One of the guns, a Glock semiautomatic pistol, was found by authorities when Tilmon was pulled over in Sandy Springs, Georgia on Nov. 21, 2020.
Tilmon was initially indicted in U.S. District Court in St. Louis on March 3, 2021. When the U.S. Marshals found and arrested him on Oct. 14, 2021, a second Glock pistol with an extended magazine was discovered.
In a sentencing memo, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kourtney Bell said that on July 28, 2020, an East St. Louis police officer spotted Tilmon with what appeared to be an assault rifle in the driver’s seat of in a car outside of a nightclub. The incident triggered an officer-involved shooting that injured a passenger in Tilmon’s car. Law enforcement later discovered that two pistols found in Tilmon’s car were purchased by Turner at the same gun store as in the August purchase.
Tilmon still faces a federal charge in Georgia of being a felon in possession of a firearm and state charges in Illinois, Bell said in court.
Turner pleaded guilty on Feb. 11, 2022, and was sentenced to two years of probation after pleading guilty to two counts of making a false statement to a federally-licensed firearms dealer: on July 16, 2020, and again on August 8, 2020.
The case was investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kourtney Bell prosecuted the case.
