The West Side man was having another bad day in a life filled with bad days on Jan. 25, 2020, and those around him were paying the price.
Just after 5 p.m. that evening, the sister of the man’s girlfriend called 911 to report that Brandon Johnson was drunk and high and armed with a handgun in her home on the 2300 block of West Jackson Boulevard.
During an argument, Johnson reportedly pulled out the gun and, according to a court document, told the woman, “I’ll shoot you if you ever thought about stabbing me.”
The woman permitted responding police inside her home, where there were “six or seven other people in the residence, most of them children.” After officers found Johnson and another man in the back of the house, Johnson was partially frisked about the waist, and “denied having a firearm but admitted that he was ‘so high’ and ‘intoxicated.’” He also first denied, then admitted, that he’d argued with the woman.
Because of his inconsistent statements, he was handcuffed while police questioned others. When a sergeant entered the room, he asked if Johnson had been frisked, and immediately patted him all the way down his pants leg, at which point “a firearm fell to the ground.”
The loaded 38-caliber revolver was seized; Johnson was arrested, charged in state court, and spent the next five months in Cook County jail. He was confined to house arrest for an additional 192 days before the case was dismissed in December 2020.
However, Johnson had been indicted federally — under seal — for being a felon in possession of a firearm. On Dec. 22, 2020, Federal Judge Heather K. McShain ordered Johnson held pending trial; he spent the first two years at the Winnebago County Jail.
In October 2022, Johnson moved to suppress the gun seized from him at the time of his arrest by Chicago police, because he alleged the police had frisked him three times. In June 2024 Judge John Robert Blakely denied the motion, ruling the repeated frisks were constitutionally proper, due to the “evolving circumstances of the police activity, including Johnson’s evasive answers to officers’ subsequent questioning.”
“A reasonable officer,” Blakely ruled, “could conclude that Johnson possessed a weapon and was concealing it on his person, providing reasonable suspicion for a second frisk.”
Last March, Johnson entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors, admitting he had knowingly possessed the gun as a convicted felon. Prosecutors noted that the anticipated advisory sentencing guidelines in Johnson’s case was 84 to 105 months but also acknowledged that the defense calculations of his criminal history indicated an anticipated sentence range between 57 and 71 months.
“Johnson’s decision on the evening of Jan. 25, 2020, to brandish his firearm and threaten to shoot (the woman) with it while multiple children were present at (the home) unnecessarily created a risk of violence and danger to himself and others, including the Chicago police officers who detained Johnson later that night,” prosecutors argued in their sentencing memo.
As is usually the case, the prosecution and defense came from different perspectives at sentencing.
“Johnson’s history and characteristics warrant a high-end guidelines sentence,” prosecutors wrote. “Johnson is no stranger to the criminal justice system, and his record demonstrates that he does not respect the law, has thus far shown no intention of becoming a law-abiding citizen, and is a danger to the public.”
Johnson, prosecutors noted, had eight convictions as an adult, including for armed robbery and possession of a controlled substance on four occasions.
In arguing for a downward departure from the guidelines, Johnson’s attorney, John Miraglia, filed numerous confirmation letters and certificates showing Johnson had participated in numerous jail programs designed to help prepare inmates for life after release, including courses on anger management, substance abuse and job searches.
Miraglia said much of Johnson’s behavior stems from pain, and the pain comes from a litany of personal loss he’s suffered.
On Aug. 13, Judge Blakey sentenced Johnson to 55 months in prison, effectively time served. Bureau of Prisons records indicate Johnson was released two days later. He must serve three years of court supervised release and stay out of trouble.
Whether Johnson is more the man prosecutors have documented or the man his family says he is an open question. Even those who love him aren’t certain. His criminal record shows he’s had numerous so-called second chances. But documents filed with the court by Miraglia suggest he never really had a first chance.
Johnson, the sixth of seven kids, grew up in the Rockwell Gardens Housing Complex, in a chaotic and impoverished home, wearing hand-me downs and eating mayonnaise sandwiches. Outside the home, interviews show, he witnessed “fighting, gangbanging (and) shooting,” a sister strung out on drugs, two brothers go to prison, two sisters die and 40 people he knew be shot to death.
Laughed at and mocked because he was in special education classes, Johnson was constantly fighting, either due to his temper or being attacked for no other reason than he lived in a different housing project building than others.
“He had to fight all the time,” his sister Keisha said in a series of family member interviews. “Fights that were based on what building you lived in.”
“If you were from a certain building, you couldn’t get caught (in) certain places, she said.” Johnson got caught more than once, and they weren’t all fair fights.
He was 12 when a car drove by the projects and someone shot at him and a friend. When he was 14, he was hit in the head with a 2 x 4, then with a chair. At 15, he was hit in the head again, by a brick, from the same guy who’d hit him with the chair, and others physically jumped on him.
“Fighting was pretty constant growing up,” Johnson told an interviewer. “Fighting was always happening in the projects, it was just normal.” He said he wasn’t a gang member, but hung around with gang bangers, “Trying to fit it.”
“He was affiliated (with gangs) because of his friends,” Johnson’s brother Harry said. “(That) made him a target.”
Homeless at 18, Johnson was constantly moving between houses. At age 20, he was shot in the back but managed to run away before the shooter could get off a second shot. It was one of 20 times, he said, he’s been shot at.
Johnson’s sister Keisha spoke for her brother in a letter to the court and in interviews produced by Miraglia. “What’s bottled inside my brother, I cannot fix,” she said. Keeping things bottled up, she said, “has led to him getting caught up in unnecessary situations.”
Harry called him “a good dude with a good heart,” who was just trying to get along, but didn’t tolerate being bullied. Johnson said police still labeled him as a gang member anyway.
“Police would label you as a certain gang based on the building you lived in,” Harry recalled. In high school, every street gang in Johnson’s West Side area went to Crane High, and Johnson, his brother said, had “no choice but to deal with it.”
Perhaps the hardest blow Johnson took, his brother said, was the death of his young daughter, Briara, who suffered from health issues.
“After he lost his daughter, he really turned for the worst,” Harry said. “He ain’t never been the same.”
“My brother just needs some real help,” Keisha told an interviewer. “Jail doesn’t help.”
There are things that her brother has to “’seek inside or he’s going to keep going through the revolving doors,” she said. The text of her interview is silent on the subject, but her words betray an unspoken fear of the worst.
“Once the system gets a hold of you and you’re Black, it’s over with,” she said.