A woman’s voice came through the 911 line in broken, breathless fragments—shock, pain, and disbelief layered on top of each other.

“Police. Yes. I’m at this McDonald’s off East Berry Street. Someone just tried to jack me from my car… and they shot me.”

The dispatcher pushed for clarity.

“You’re in your car right now?”

“Yes. He didn’t get it, but he shot me.”

Officers would later describe it as the kind of call that changes the temperature in a room. Not because a robbery had gone wrong—carjackings happen in any major city—but because this one carried a pattern. The violence wasn’t accidental. It was escalating.

And for investigators in Fort Worth, Texas, there was no longer a question of whether they were dealing with an opportunistic criminal. The question was how many more victims there would be before they stopped him.

The first report that ultimately put the city on high alert began with something that sounded almost domestic—an older woman calling about her own family.

On the night of May 3, 2020, a worried caller reached police and told them her car had been stolen out of her driveway.

“Can you please help me?” she said. “Someone just stole my car out of my driveway. I’ve been having trouble with this guy. He’s my grandson. Then he come back and stole my car.”

She gave his name without hesitation.

“His name is Jeremiah Stevenson.”

It forced officers to focus quickly on a practical task: locate a stolen vehicle and a suspect believed to be driving it. The description put them on the lookout for a white Toyota.

Less than twenty-four hours later, a grainy CCTV feed from a remote area near an illegal dumping site produced footage that would ignite a far bigger investigation.

At approximately 11:00 a.m. on May 4, the video captured a white Toyota entering the frame and stopping. A man stepped out. His clothing was unusual—partially dressed, exposed from the waist down in a way that looked chaotic, not theatrical. He scanned the area, got back in, then stepped out again. The behavior wasn’t clearly criminal, but it was strange enough to hold the attention of analysts.

Then someone zoomed in.

The license plate didn’t match the vehicle.

The plate was registered to a different car entirely.

For the analyst watching the feed, that mismatch wasn’t a clerical hiccup. It was an immediate alarm. People who swap plates do it for one reason: they don’t want to be identified.

Officers were dispatched to the dumping site, but by the time they arrived the white Toyota was gone. What began as a suspicious observation became an unanswered lead.

Back at the crime center, analysts ran the plate and cross-referenced what they could. At first, there appeared to be no confirmed connection between the stolen-car report and the dumping-site footage.

Then they pulled a driver’s license photo tied to the suspect name from the 911 call.

Everything snapped into alignment.

The man in the footage was Jeremiah Stevenson.

The white Toyota at the dumping site was the grandmother’s stolen vehicle.

By early afternoon on May 5, traffic cameras tracked Stevenson driving the white Toyota through Fort Worth. When officers tried to stop him, he fled.

The pursuit turned immediately dangerous—reckless speeds, aggressive maneuvers, traffic weaving.

Over the radio, an instruction cut through.

“Terminate the pursuit. It’s too reckless.”

Officers ended the chase not because Stevenson had escaped, but because chasing him through city streets risked turning one suspect into multiple dead civilians.

They backed off, hoping the separation would force him to slow down.

But even as units disengaged, new information was arriving—information that stripped away any hope that this was a temporary panic.

Investigators pulled CCTV from a convenience store robbery reported the night of May 3.

The same white Toyota appeared.

Stevenson walked into the store, approached the clerk, and fired at point-blank range.

There was no hesitation. No frantic rummaging. No confusion. Just deliberate violence.

From that moment, the case shifted into a different category: active predator.

The stakes rose again when detectives ran Stevenson’s background.

His record was not the profile of someone spiraling for the first time.

He had recently served time for aggravated robbery.

“He was no stranger to violent crime,” one investigator said later. “He’s a very dangerous individual you’ve got to get in custody as quick as you can.”

Then came the call that turned fear into urgency.

It was about thirty-two hours after the first shooting.

A woman called 911 from a McDonald’s parking lot near East Berry Street.

“Ma’am, what’s the emergency?”

“I have to go to the hospital,” she said, voice shaking. “I thought it was a pop gun, but he actually shot me. I’m wounded.”

Her name, she said, was Donna.

She was still in her car.

And she had been hit.

When officers arrived, they found her sitting inside the vehicle, bleeding, stunned, but alive. Medics worked quickly, checking for entry and exit wounds, attempting to locate the path of the projectile.

A nearby surveillance camera captured the entire encounter—the suspect moving through parked cars with a kind of selection process that made seasoned officers uneasy.

“He was being selective,” an investigator said. “There were several cars that came through. He didn’t approach those cars.”

Donna’s Toyota pulled up to the menu board.

Stevenson approached the driver’s side.

The camera caught the moment he raised his arm.

A gun pointed into the car.

A shot fired.

Then another.

Two shots at close range.

Donna’s vehicle accelerated out of the lot, leaving Stevenson standing behind, weapon still in hand.

To detectives, the escalation was the most frightening part.

In an earlier incident, he had fired what appeared to be a warning shot and walked away.

Now he was shooting people.

The difference between intimidation and attempted murder can be measured in a fraction of a second.

That fraction had already passed.

For law enforcement, there was only one priority left.

Find Jeremiah Stevenson before he found another victim.

Hours of searching followed. Patrol units canvassed likely areas. Analysts tracked potential routes. Witness calls were triaged as fast as they came in.

Finally, officers received a location: a trucking yard south of the McDonald’s.

For the first time since the shootings, they had him in sight.

Units moved in quickly. The perimeter tightened. In cases like this, time is everything—the longer a suspect moves freely, the more unpredictable he becomes.

But Stevenson slipped the net.

He ran.

Still armed.

From the yard, railroad tracks cut away from the city, a linear escape line that offered distance and cover from converging units.

An officer monitoring radio traffic heard it and understood immediately.

A man walking the tracks.

Not running blindly.

Moving with intention.

One of the closest officers—a plainclothes unit in an unmarked truck—watched Stevenson approach along the tracks. Stevenson moved toward the vehicle, closing distance.

In that moment, officers made a decision.

They would not let him surprise them.

They would turn the tables.

Stevenson stepped into the open.

He did not see what was waiting.

Within moments, he was taken into custody without further incident.

When officers searched him, they found a .22 caliber revolver tucked into his waistband.

Across his shoulder was a backpack.

Inside it was a document.

At first, officers didn’t know what it was.

But it would soon reshape how they understood the entire spree.

At the interrogation room, Stevenson’s behavior suggested something deeper than denial.

He wasn’t fixated on questions.

He was fixated on exits.

He looked around the room like someone evaluating a blueprint. He rose. He moved toward the door. He studied the hardware.

Through the peephole, a detective watching said it out loud as it happened.

“He took his handcuffs off. He’s trying to escape.”

Officers rushed in, restrained him again, and added leg restraints.

When a detective entered to begin questioning, Stevenson’s first real curiosity wasn’t about what he was accused of.

It was about the building.

“I just had one question,” he said. “If I would have got through there… would I have got out at that front door? Is that front door open or locked?”

The detective tried to steer him back.

“All I can do is talk to you and find out your side of what’s going on today.”

Stevenson floated a negotiation.

“If I talk to you… can you do stuff like get me a single cell?”

He wanted benefits before he wanted truth.

When told housing decisions were up to the jail, Stevenson’s frustration sounded transactional, not human.

“So basically I can’t get nothing out of this deal.”

The detective pressed.

“Tell me what happened this morning.”

Stevenson claimed the only thing he remembered was walking on railroad tracks and being arrested.

When the detective mentioned the McDonald’s, Stevenson tried to wipe it away.

“I don’t remember being at McDonald’s.”

The detective confronted him with what investigators had: video evidence.

“We know what happens on those videos,” he said. “There’s more than one today.”

He explained the reality Stevenson was facing—aggravated robbery, aggravated assault, attempted killing.

“You want to start showing a little bit of remorse,” the detective said. “Because that’s what the videos look like. If you want to go with just being a stone-cold ‘I tried to kill people,’ we can go with that all day long.”

Stevenson clung to an excuse.

A blackout.

The detective rejected it.

“No, I don’t. You don’t act like somebody who blacked out.”

Then Stevenson shifted again, offering something that sounded like fantasy until it started matching the evidence.

“I’ll be having… visions,” he said. “My dreams… I can vaguely…”

The detective leaned in.

“Tell me about the dream.”

Stevenson described attempting to steal a car and firing at a window.

The detective asked if the weapon in the dream was the same gun found on him.

Stevenson said yes.

The confession wasn’t direct, but it wasn’t accidental either. It was denial wearing a mask.

The detective’s next move was calculated.

He pivoted to another case from the same day—another frantic 911 call.

This one had come from a woman at a convenience store.

“I need an ambulance,” she said. “I was shot. Somebody tried to jack my car. My name’s Donna.”

The dispatcher asked where she’d been hit.

“In my head,” she said. “I don’t know if it just grazed me or what.”

Investigators later reconstructed the scene.

Donna had stopped at a convenience store to get a soda and use an ATM. Inside, she noticed a man standing near the building. Something about him made her nervous. She left quickly, got into her vehicle, locked the doors.

He was already there—at the passenger side—trying to get in.

Shots followed.

When responding officers arrived, they saw the passenger window had been struck multiple times. Powder burn marks showed how close the gun had been.

One bullet cracked the glass.

Another penetrated.

A projectile went through and lodged in Donna’s head.

She survived by inches.

In court terms, inches are the distance between aggravated assault and capital murder.

In the interrogation room, Stevenson tried to reset.

“It happened today?” he asked, as if surprised.

When told there was video of him firing there too, he tried to return to blackout language.

The detective cut him off.

“Oh, we’re not going through the whole blackout thing again. We know that’s bogus.”

He explained, line by line, why the evidence contradicted Stevenson’s story.

The store video showed Stevenson following the victim into the store.

It showed him making a purchase.

It showed him handing over money.

Fine motor skills.

People who are “blacked out” don’t execute clean sequences of choice, purchase, stalking, and attack.

Then the detective watched Stevenson closely and noticed something small.

A flicker.

A hint of a smile.

“The hint of a smile that just came across your face tells me you really remember,” the detective said.

Stevenson’s voice dropped.

“I got a serious problem, man,” he said. “I don’t know what be happening. What’s happening to me? I’ve been missing things.”

The detective asked the question that matters in every violent spree.

“Did anybody get hurt?”

“Yes,” the detective answered. “But nobody died.”

Stevenson asked how bad it was.

The detective refused to narrate it for him.

“Why don’t you tell me what you remember, and I’ll tell you how bad it was.”

Stevenson tried again to keep it inside the dream.

“I thought I was trying to shoot the window out,” he said.

The detective pressed.

“What window did you think you were shooting out? Driver’s side or passenger side?”

Stevenson gave no clear answer.

Then he offered something chilling—almost playful.

“Can I dream have a dream tonight and get back with you?”

The detective shut it down.

“No. I’m not going to play that game with you. You remember what happened. You were there.”

He said it plain.

“You are stone-cold would-be killer.”

Stevenson repeated it, as if testing the phrase.

“I shot people.”

“Oh, yeah,” the detective replied. “And you show absolutely zero remorse for what happened.”

After roughly ninety minutes, detectives recognized they were not going to extract clarity or accountability from Stevenson in that room.

He was transferred to jail.

But the case did not end there.

Back at the crime center, investigators opened the document recovered from Stevenson’s backpack.

It wasn’t a diary.

It wasn’t random scribbling.

It read like a plan.

He had titled it with words that made the hair on seasoned investigators’ arms rise.

“Navy Seal Militia.”

Inside, it laid out a sequence:

Get a car.

Change the license plates.

Go to a grocery store.

Watch an ATM.

Wait for a lone female.

Then, as soon as possible:

Buy an AR-10.

Go “Navy Seal militia.”

Start robbing banks.

To detectives, the significance was immediate.

This wasn’t impulse.

It wasn’t confusion.

It was intent—written down, carried on his back, ready to be executed.

One investigator described it bluntly.

“He was one of the most dangerous predators that we had dealt with in a long time.”

The judicial process moved on a slower timeline than the violence that triggered it, but the pattern remained clear: each act was building toward something larger.

Stevenson was held at the Lon Evans Correction Center.

Seven months into continuous custody, another event reinforced what police already believed about him.

On December 1, 2020, at approximately 3:40 a.m., Stevenson attempted to escape.

Using a fire extinguisher, he broke a fifth-floor window.

Then he lowered himself down the side of the building using a hose.

Nine minutes later, he was recaptured.

It wasn’t just an escape attempt.

It was confirmation of mindset: the same refusal to submit, the same obsession with exits, the same belief that rules were for other people.

On October 14, 2021, a jury found Jeremiah Stevenson guilty.

He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

For Donna, the survival would always come with an invisible scar—an understanding of how close she came to dying in a parking lot while ordering fast food.

For investigators, the case would sit in memory as an example of what modern predation can look like: not a single explosive event, but a stepped escalation, documented and carried forward like a blueprint.

The city’s relief did not come from understanding why he did it.

It came from the simple fact that, finally, he could not do it again.