Saturday was a banner night for carjackings in Dallas. The one in which the thief drove off with a 14-year-old girl sleeping in the backseat got the most attention, but there were several. At 1 a.m., a man was attacked by a group of men who took his Cadillac Escalade, holding him hostage for two hours before throwing him from the moving vehicle. At 5 a.m. at Northwest Highway and Webb Chapel Road, a man was beaten and robbed of his GMC Yukon.
The flurry of aggravated vehicle theft was capped off later that morning in the parking lot of the abandoned Centennial Liquor at Stemmons Freeway and Inwood Road. That's where David Stakes, a 54-year-old living out of his car, pulled his battered, 17-year-old Chevrolet Suburban to go to sleep.
Stakes told police that he was awakened at 8:30 a.m. by a man at his driver's side door who was wearing all black -- shorts, baseball cap, T-shirt -- and pointing a black handgun. "Get out of the car," he announced. "I'm taking your shit."
Stakes, reluctant to part with the entirety of his earthly possessions, refused. He was given the option of either climbing into the back seat or taking a bullet. He chose the former.
The man, later identified by police as 23-year-old Wesley Gerrard Jones, climbed in the passenger seat. An accomplice, later identified as 31-year-old Eryka Templeton, got behind the wheel. Stakes bailed a few moments later.
The car was missing for about an hour. A patrol officer spotted it at a Motel 6 off LBJ Freeway in Northwest Dallas. He checked the motel's surveillance videos and, according to the report he later filed, watched Jones and Templeton pull into the parking lot and walk into room No. 115.
When officers knocked on the door, they found Jones hiding in the bathroom alongside Stakes' work boots. A 9-mm pistol had been wrapped in a blue bandana, sealed in a plastic baggie, and stuffed in the toilet tank. Templeton was sitting next to the air conditioning unit, where the cops would later discover the GPS unit from the suburban. According to police, Templeton confessed to the robbery.
Templeton and Jones are being held in Lew Sterrett. Her bond is $75,000, his $100,000. However, she has to suffer the added indignity of showing up like this in Dallas County's inmate search:
