Rape on a country road in Chadds Ford after armed ‘agents of chaos’ go on rush hour ‘ramming’ rampage

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The woman sipped her coffee, nibbled on a sesame bagel and listened to an audiobook as she cruised to work.

It was a little after 7 a.m., and the 28-year-old mother of two young children was driving from her home on Philadelphia’s Main Line to her health care job in Delaware’s Chateau Country.

On this mid-April Friday morning in 2023, with spring coming into full bloom, she decided to take the scenic route. So she pulled off busy U.S. Route 1 in Chadds Ford onto Creek Road, which winds along woodlands and open fields that stretch to the Brandywine.

Soon after the woman turned onto the quiet country road, she was startled to see a black SUV in her rearview mirror, coming up fast, and then bumping her compact car.

She drove a little further until she thought it was safe to pull over, and dialed 911.

As she detailed the crash to the dispatcher, the big black vehicle also pulled up.

A man got out. He wore all black, with a hood over his head.

She heard him say in a soft-spoken voice that her car didn’t have much damage, so she stepped out to look.

That’s when she saw the black gun, pointed at her chest.

She screamed, but the man with the gun silenced her.

Be quiet, he warned, if you want to live.

Driving a stolen Jeep, posing with gun at campus party

On the previous night, three young men from Wilmington were partying at Delaware State University.

One was 24-year-old Tonnaire McNair, known as Toon. Another was David Hinson, 21, who went by Chucky. The third was 19-year-old Makhiya Powell.

They had driven the 50 miles south to the Dover campus in a black Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT, a high-performance SUV with tinted windows. One of them had stolen the vehicle days earlier, and equipped it with fake tags.

At the party, one of the men showed the others a Glock-style “ghost” handgun made with a 3D printer and they took photos of themselves posing with the 9 mm weapon that had an extended magazine. Ghost guns are made with parts bought online and don’t have serial numbers that allow them to be traced.

The trio also posed in front of the Jeep, with and without their faces covered.

They left well after 2 a.m., and on the way home decided, Hinson later recalled, “to go ramming.”

Hinson told police that meant approaching parked cars to see if they were locked. If they weren’t, they’d rummage through the interior looking for money or other items to steal.

They stopped at Powell’s home in Wilmington’s Towne Estates complex for a spell and then, once daybreak came, the ramming Hinson described took a more sinister form.

Raped and discarded, wailing young mother seeks shelter

So began a 3 1/2 hour rampage that traversed several affluent residential enclaves, stunning natural areas and historical sites that straddle the Pennsylvania and Delaware border.

WHYY News reviewed thousands of pages of trial transcripts and other court documents and investigative files to tell the inside story of what transpired that fateful morning and the intense hunt for the men that federal prosecutor Kevin Pierce called the “four agents of chaos.”

Starting at 6:30 a.m., they nearly crashed into one vehicle and rear-ended three others. Three of those incidents ended rather benignly, with the Jeep taking off and only one person suffering a minor injury. The three drivers — a math teacher and two nurses going to work — called 911 to report the harrowing incidents.

“Oh, God,” one ramming victim, who said her neck and back hurt, told the dispatcher. “He hit my car, he ran off. He stopped and he looked at me, and he ran off.”

The men in the Jeep — McNair, Hinson and Powell — moved further north, into Pennsylvania’s Chadds Ford area, home to the Brandywine Museum of Art and Brandywine Battlefield.

Their next victim was driving on Creek Road, perhaps thinking of her two little kids, the youngest just 10 weeks old.

The rushing sound of the speeding vehicle and the crash jarred her out of her complacency.

She pulled over to where she thought it was safe, but during her 911 call a stocky man in black clothes and white sneakers pointed the gun at her chest, smacked her cell phone out of her hand and forced her back inside her car.

The man shoved her back inside and took the wheel, then headed north. The Jeep followed briefly but lost track of it and returned to Wilmington.

While driving, with the gun pointed at the woman, he forced her to undress, then sexually assaulted her. WHYY News does not identify victims of sexual assault.

But as she was being carjacked and assaulted, the woman turned and looked at her attacker.

“He had a mask on covering the bottom of his face, but he had a tattoo on the right side of his face,’’ she later testified in U.S. District Court in Delaware. “It looked like characters, but I couldn’t make it out. I couldn’t read it.”

The woman told jurors she “was very worried that he was going to kill me, but I knew that if he didn’t, I just didn’t want him to be able to get away. Like I needed to be able to give the police something to find him.”

Police later learned that their carjacking, kidnapping and rape suspect was McNair and that he had the word “Jacquez” tattooed around his right eye.

After driving for a few minutes he stopped on Heyburn Road in Chadds Ford, at a clearing in front of two long driveways to sprawling estate properties.

He ordered her out of the car and raped her.

Afterward, “he demanded more bank information,” she testified, adding that she gave him her pin numbers to credit and debit cards in her purse. “And he got back in the car and drove away.”

“I started screaming for help, because I didn’t know if he was going to come back,” she testified.

She ran down one driveway and knocked on the home’s front door, still howling.

No one answered, so she ran more than 50 yards to the next house, where a woman answered and let her inside. Her husband brought a blanket so she could cover up.

Police took her to the hospital and contacted her husband.

Using the info from the bank cards, investigators began trying to track any monetary transactions and locate her silver car, the black Jeep and the attacker.

Man in unique white sneakers uses cards at Wawa, other ATMs

At 7:43 a.m., a man in black garb and white sneakers backed the woman’s car into a parking spot at the Wawa store on U.S. Route 202, about a mile into Delaware.

He strolled to an ATM machine and, using her cards, withdrew $400, and then went to a second machine and stole another $200.

A detective later testified that the store’s surveillance video showed the man wore “unique white Yeezy sneakers” that had a “kind of bubbly design that runs along the outsole of the shoe.”

Photos posted to social media that were taken the previous evening showed McNair wearing those same shoes, court records showed.

His next stop was Market Street in downtown Wilmington, where he tried to take more money from the ATM at Miller’s Check Cashing store, but was unsuccessful.

Video showed him getting back into the woman’s car, which was next seen about 8 a.m. at Towne Estates. Hinson, Powell and another man, 21-year-old Michael Caldwell, waited for him.

“He says he got on some money, he got some cards, got the keys to the [woman’s car],” Hinson later testified. “We went out there, we searched the [car] and wiped it down.”

Video footage from Towne Estates, including a Ring doorbell camera, showed all four men either walking in the parking lot, circling a stolen red Pathfinder or leaning into the woman’s car.

Hinson later said that following McNair’s directive, they used rags to wipe “the steering wheel, the doors, the seats to cover his tracks’’ by trying to remove DNA or fingerprint evidence. Powell also took the woman’s purse.

McNair also changed at the townhouse, Hinson said, into a hoodie with a large Polo logo and black and white Nike Foamposite sneakers. Social media photos from a few days earlier show McNair wearing those same clothes, court records showed.

Two caught, two escape after wild chases on Interstate 95

Hinson and Caldwell drove the Pathfinder to a nearby Royal Farms gas station at 8:30 a.m. McNair and Powell showed up in the Jeep a few minutes later, but so did Wilmington cops, who had been searching for the Jeep.

McNair screeched out of the lot. Police began chasing the Jeep up I-95, but the souped-up vehicle eluded them.

McNair and Powell later sent Hinson and Caldwell a pin for their location near the train station in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania.

The duo went looking for the Jeep but on I-95 the Pathfinder hit a work van. When the van followed them, Caldwell leaned out the window and pointed the gun at the workers, who called 911.

Delaware state trooper Shane Marioni was in an unmarked car looking for the two vehicles when the Pathfinder passed him near the state line. He tried to stop it but the Pathfinder raced toward I-95 before going south on the highway, Marioni testified.

Marioni and other police gave chase, and a state police helicopter filmed from the air.

Marioni said he reached speeds of 115 mph as the Pathfinder drove on the shoulder and cut in front of slower vehicles.

But at the U.S. Route 202 exit, traffic was congested and the Pathfinder slammed into a Mercedes sedan that had slowed and ricocheted into a highway sign.

Hinson and Caldwell hopped out and ran, but both were caught within seconds. They had discarded the gun but police found it the next day under a concrete drainage ditch.

You can view the chase from the helicopter online.

Hinson had key evidence — the rape victim’s bank cards and her key fob.

More importantly, he admitted his role and told detectives that McNair had earlier carjacked the woman at gunpoint.

Fleeing to Maryland in stolen Durango Hellcat

McNair and Powell had escaped, though, and somehow found their way out of Marcus Hook, where police found the abandoned Jeep.

But based on Hinson’s account, the surveillance photos, pictures on social media and the rape victim’s description of the tattoo, authorities had determined that McNair, who had a history of assault, car theft and other crimes, was the likely rapist. Federal prosecutor Samuel Frey later called McNair “the ringleader’’ of the foursome.

Powell was caught on April 17, three days after the attack, during a vehicle stop.

A task force of 75 officers also fanned out that day to several places he was known to frequent.

They spotted him near Wilmington but he took off in a stolen red Dodge Durango Hellcat with a stolen license plate that proclaimed HWY2HEL.

Later that day, though, with the help of a license plate reader in Maryland, they tracked McNair to a relative’s home in Hagerstown, 150 miles from Wilmington. The Hellcat was there, covered by a tarp.

Officers nabbed McNair in the back of a van parked at the house, screaming as he was put in handcuffs.

He was wearing the Nike Foamposite sneakers.

75 years in federal prison for ‘calculated act of brutality’

Authorities decided to have federal prosecutors oversee the investigation and a grand jury indicted the four that July.

All but McNair, whose DNA and fingerprints were not found in the woman’s car, admitted their guilt.

Powell pleaded in federal court to conspiracy to commit robbery and being an accessory after the fact to kidnapping. He was sent to prison for 12 ½ years.

Hinson pleaded guilty to the same charges as Powell plus abetting the brandishing of a firearm in relation to a robbery. He faces at least seven years behind bars when he’s sentenced in March.

Caldwell had his case transferred to Delaware Superior Court, where he pleaded guilty to two counts each of aggravated menacing and possession of a firearm during a felony. He got six years in state prison.

Neither Caldwell nor Powell cooperated with the prosecution of McNair, but Hinson testified against his friend.

McNair was convicted of kidnapping, carjacking, brandishing a firearm during a robbery, robbery across state lines and other offenses. There is no rape statute in federal law but that crime was encompassed in the kidnapping charge.

McNair did not testify during the three-day trial and his attorney, Luis Ortiz, did not put on a defense. Ortiz would not comment for this article.

Last month, Delaware’s chief federal judge Colm Connolly sentenced McNair to 75 years in prison.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Pierce said their violent spree embodied the nightmare scenario that people never think can happen to them or their loved ones while they’re simply driving to work.

“The reality is this randomness of ‘we are going to just inflict chaos onto strangers for no real apparent reason,’” Pierce said.

“And at the end of the day, these guys only stole maybe a couple hundred bucks, but they caused so much damage. And unfortunately for the [rape victim], she’s going to have to live with this every every day for the rest of her life.”