Important safety tip for criminals: Don't pull a gun on a United States Marshal. 

That's the lesson learned on July 5th by one Kentrell Flowers, 18, who walked up to a vehicle containing not one but two U.S. Marshals and pulled a gun in what appears to have been an attempted carjacking. The Marshals were parked outside of, and providing security for, the home of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Flowers ended up being shot and later treated for non-life-threatening injuries. 

A deputy US Marshal shot a suspected carjacker who pulled a gun on two marshals guarding Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home in Washington, DC, officials said.

The deputies were parked outside Sotomayor’s home in northwest DC on July 5 when Kentrell Flowers, 18, allegedly walked up to one of their cars around 1:15 a.m. and pointed a gun at the bodyguard, the US Marshals Service told The Post.

The marshal drew his weapon and fired several shots at the suspect, who was arrested and treated at a local hospital for non-life-threatening injuries, officials said.

It's unclear whether Flowers was even aware of his proximity to Justice Sotomayor's residence, so it's unlikely that the choice of target, while unfortunate for Flowers, was connected to the Justice in any way.

See Related: Carjacker Gets Dirt Napped After Trying to Rob an Amazon Delivery Driver 

Private Security, Rampant Theft and Carjackings: Our Cities Continue to Disintegrate

Most carjackers in the District of Columbia are never caught or convicted, according to the D.C. Witness' Jeff Levine.

While carjackings have tripled in recent years and remain a “real threat,” says a source in the US Attorney’s office, most offenders don’t get caught. For the relatively few that are charged, conviction rates differ significantly and prosecutions can drag on for years, according to a D.C. Witness review of the data. 

Out of 2,227 total carjacking offenses documented by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) from 2020 through 2023, 607 or just 27 percent end with an arrest or are closed for other reasons.

Only a fraction of these incidents resulted in convictions for adults while juvenile prosecutions seem more effective. according to D.C. Witness data and findings from the DC Sentencing Commission.

Levine also points out that most of the District's carjackings are committed by juveniles.

According to the MPD, between 2020 to March of this year, there were 569 actual carjacking arrests, 360 or 63 percent of which were minors between the ages of 12 and 17 years old.

Juvenile carjackings are handled by the Office of the DC Attorney General, which last year prosecuted 186 cases with an overall conviction rate of about 80 percent.

It's also important to note that the District's municipal government bends every effort to prevent residents from arming themselves in self-defense against criminals; if there had been ordinary citizens in that car rather than United States Marshals, the carjacking would likely have been successful, and we would only know of it through another slight tick in the District's crime statistics - unless the event had escalated into one of the instances in which the crime victims are shot or otherwise injured.

This incident, which fortunately ended without serious injury or fatality, was largely the result of a bad choice of attempted victim on the part of Kentrell Flowers. Ordinary citizens would have fared much less well in the encounter in the D.C. area.