Delaka “Danielle” Augins was shot and killed in Baltimore City in 2022 when carjackers tried to stop the car she was riding in. On Tuesday, the man police say fired the gun was sentenced to 30 years in prison in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

Anecio Rodriguez, 21, of Baltimore, is one of six young men who were charged with being part of a group that ambushed and robbed unsuspecting drivers at gunpoint in 2022 and 2023. He is the only one of the group who was charged in Augins’ murder.

Augins, 38, was a passenger in a white Nissan Altima traveling down a one-way street in Baltimore’s Reservoir Hill neighborhood around 4:40 a.m. Nov. 3, 2022. Another car approached from the wrong direction on Brookfield Avenue, and a man jumped out and pointed a handgun at the Nissan, according to investigators. As the driver tried to maneuver past the carjackers, a gunman fired one shot into the passenger side, killing Augins.

The events leading up to the shooting began less than 10 minutes earlier, when gunmen carjacked a woman who was waiting at the Gopuff warehouse on West 23rd Street for orders she was scheduled to deliver.

The stolen car was then used minutes later in the attempted carjacking and Augins’ murder, according to investigators. The owner of the stolen car was able to track her phone, which the carjackers also had taken. Her car was found later that morning not far from the shooting scene with white paint on a scrape on the driver’s side, according to police. Investigators said the paint came from the two cars scraping against each other as the victim driver tried to get away.

The complex, multi-agency investigation prompted by Augins’ murder ultimately involved more than a dozen carjackings and other crimes. Though most of the robberies and carjackings took place in Baltimore City, the defendants were charged in Baltimore County by the Maryland Attorney General’s organized crime division.

According to the attorney general’s office, the group would carjack and rob victims at gunpoint, photograph stolen vehicles along with registration cards, VIN numbers and sometimes titles, and then list the cars for sale on Facebook Marketplace.

Investigators from the Baltimore City Police Department and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives identified Lovelle Little as a potential suspect connected to the carjackings. Officers searching Little’s home found 18 sets of car keys, stolen handguns, driver’s licenses and credit cards. Detectives connected Rodriguez and other defendants to Little after reading a string of chats on his phone discussing the carjackings, prosecutor Ken Joy of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office said.

Rodriguez pleaded guilty in January to participating in a criminal organization, first-degree murder, carjacking and second-degree burglary.

The day before sentencing, a defense attorney filed a motion asking to withdraw Rodriguez’s plea. Rodriguez dropped his effort to withdraw the plea just before Tuesday’s sentencing.

His attorney, Marshall Henslee, told Judge Garret Glennon that Rodriguez had never fired a gun but chose to plead guilty rather than risk convictions on the other charges and a longer prison sentence. Under the plea agreement, the judge was required to impose an active prison term of between 22 and 30 years on the murder conviction.

“For him it was a practical decision that he made. He just wants to get home as soon as he can,” Henslee said. “The level of evidence that connects him to that particular incident (the murder) is not great.”

Henslee said investigators concluded his client was the shooter largely because surveillance video from the carjacking minutes before the shooting showed a masked man with light skin. Rodriguez, Henslee said, had the lightest complexion of any of the six suspects in the carjackings.

Joy urged Glennon to consider the totality of the group’s crimes when deciding Rodriguez’s sentence.

“These individuals were running around the city and the county committing carjackings, robberies, burglaries, having no care in the world for anybody,” Joy said.

Augins’ family members told Glennon about the deep sense of loss her murder caused their family. They described her as funny, fun-loving and outgoing, someone who loved to sing and have a good time. They said she had faced difficulties in her life but did not deserve what happened to her.

“She was a loving mother,” Augins’ aunt, Yvonne Augins, told Glennon. “She had one child. She will never get to see her child get married. She will never get to see her first grandchild. They (the defendant’s family) will get to visit their child. We got to go to the cemetery and talk to her.”

Henslee told the judge his client was exposed to drugs before his birth and has severe ADHD that led him to quit school after ninth grade. He also said Rodriguez suffered brain injuries in two separate dirt bike incidents and was found incompetent to stand trial in an earlier, unrelated juvenile proceeding.

Glennon said he had read several letters supporting Rodriguez and heard the defense’s arguments for a 22-year sentence, the minimum allowed under the plea agreement.

“He has brought himself here, not the victim in any way, shape, or form,” Glennon said. “There is tragedy on both sides, but it is the defendant’s doing.”

Glennon agreed there was a range of culpability among the defendants in the group but noted that Rodriguez was the one charged with murder.

“This was not a single incident…this was an organization, a group of individuals who engaged in crimes for months,” he said. “That is significant to me.”

Glennon said he believed the plea agreement was fair and imposed the maximum sentence allowed under it: life in prison with all but 30 years suspended for first-degree murder. He sentenced Rodriguez to 15 years on each of the other three counts, ordering those sentences to run concurrently with the 30-year sentence. Rodriguez will also be on probation for five years after his release.

Glennon also agreed to recommend Rodriguez for the Patuxent Youthful Offender Program.

Rodriguez’s co-defendants received the following sentences:

• Jovan Haynes, 19, was sentenced to seven years in prison.
• Kevin Mills, 23, was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
• Twan Ellis, 21, was sentenced to seven years in prison.
• Lovelle Little, 21, who originally faced more than 200 counts, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

A fifth co-defendant is a juvenile.

Editor’s note: The Baltimore County Courtroom Observer obtained audio recordings of Rodriguez’s plea and sentencing hearings from Baltimore County Circuit Court. Quotations and details from those proceedings in this story are based on those recordings.