Woman sentenced for UM carjacking

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, May 30, 2007

A Dolomite woman will spend 68 years in prison for carjacking and shooting a University of Montevallo student last summer.

Mackese Walker Speight, 29, was sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court for a series of carjacking and firearm violations.

An accomplice, Keundre Lerico Johnson, 20, of Birmingham, was sentenced to 71 years in prison earlier this month.

Speight pled guilty back in February to avoid a trial. Johnson did the same in mid-January.

The two admitted to carrying out a crime spree that started July 26 when a Birmingham pizza delivery driver was robbed and carjacked at gunpoint.

Five days later, UM graduate student Amy Holaway Rogers was abducted outside her Homewood apartment. She was later shot in Hoover as she tried to escape. She survived her injuries, but surgeons had to remove her spleen and left kidney.

The same day, Speight and Johnson car-jacked a woman outside a Leeds car wash and forced her to withdraw money from a bank ATM machine. She escaped without injury.

U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said the work of the FBI and the Hoover, Homewood and Leeds police departments led to a just sentence.

&8220;Speight will not be a danger to the public. She has driven her last car,&8221; said Martin.