Latin King who attacked R. Kelly gets life for racketeering, two murders

The Latin King street gang member who said he attacked R&B singer R. Kelly in Chicago’s federal jail was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison for a racketeering conviction that involved two 1999 murders, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Northwest Indiana.

Jeremiah Shane Farmer, 39, claims in court records that he was responsible for the August attack on Kelly in the downtown Metropolitan Correctional Center. He said he did it “in hopes of getting spotlight attention and world news notice to shed light on” alleged government corruption.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file

Instead, Farmer was moved to a separate detention facility in Michigan. And now, the feds say U.S. District Judge Philip P. Simon has sentenced Farmer to life for his role in a conspiracy that involved the 1999 murders of Marion Lowry, 74, and Harvey Siegers, 67, who were beaten to death with a hammer at their Hammond business, Calumet Auto Rebuilders.

Prosecutors asked for a life sentence for Farmer in a seven-page sentencing memo filed last week that said, “It is virtually impossible to exaggerate or oversell the depraved nature of Farmer’s crimes.” The memo described an incident in which Farmer and others attacked a woman while wearing masks because she wouldn’t stop selling drugs in a certain neighborhood. It alleged that Farmer shot the woman in the abdomen, took off his mask and shot her again.

“The common sense interpretation of Farmer’s actions is that he took his mask off before shooting her again because he believed that she was going to die from the gunshots, and wanted his face to be the last thing that she saw,” Assistant U.S. Attorney David J. Nozick wrote in the memo.

The woman lived to testify but suffered “devastating injuries,” the prosecutor wrote.

Though Farmer was moved for a time to a detention facility in Milan, Michigan, prison records on Tuesday again listed him in Chicago’s MCC. In his own letter to the judge this month, Farmer again complained of government misconduct and said he suffered from multiple mental illnesses.

“Please give me justice sir, please,” Farmer wrote. “Just give me a second chance and I will be a success story and (the) first thing I will do (is) get all my gang tattoos removed. I look like a(n) animal with all my face tattoos but I’m no animal.”

R. Kelly has been held at the MCC since his arrest by federal authorities in July 2019. The singer faces an indictment in Chicago alleging child pornography and obstruction of justice, as well as a racketeering indictment in Brooklyn.