Javion Bush (U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois)
A Chicago gang member who engaged in witness retaliation by directly telling a government cooperator “all rats must die” on Facebook Messenger is going to prison after ratting on himself.
Javion Tyree Bush, a now 23-year-old “Goonie Boss/Goonie Gang” member, was sentenced on Aug. 30, months after he pleaded guilty to the charge of witness retaliation for posting a photo on Facebook that “named the two cooperating individuals” who had testified before a grand jury, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.
“Bush tagged the Facebook accounts of the cooperators in his posting. Bush also threatened one of the cooperators in a direct communication to him on Facebook Messenger, stating, ‘All rats must die,”” prosecutors said.
The grand jury investigation related to U.S. v. Blackman, a racketeering (RICO) case against other gang members. That case ended in July with multiple convictions and a jury finding that three members of the gang were “liable for six murders while terrorizing the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side,” prosecutors said.
In their announcement on those convictions, prosecutors noted that Bush previously pleaded guilty to “being an accessory to the carjacking of an off-duty police officer on Oct. 18, 2018,” for which he received 15 months in prison. But once he got out of prison, the government said, he was “charged with, and subsequently pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice by retaliating against a witness.”
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The FBI complaint from June 2021 said that Bush and “TR,” Trevante Reed, spoke in May 2021 about “exposing them b— ass n—” by posting legal documents — “a law enforcement report” — naming two cooperating witnesses online.
“Later in the conversation Individual TR told BUSH, ‘We need to put the belt [discipline or punish] to [first name of cooperator A] and [Cooperator C],’” the FBI complaint said. “My review of the legal documents posted revealed that both Cooperator A and Cooperator C were listed in the paperwork as individuals that, according to the post, testified in the federal grand jury as a part of the joint investigation.”
Javion Bush (Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office)
Federal court records show that U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey accepted Bush’s guilty plea on Feb. 27, finding it was “a knowing and voluntary plea supported by an independent basis in fact containing each of the essential elements of the offense.”
In May, both the government and the defense submitted sentencing memoranda.
The government called Bush’s crime an “effort to silence two cooperating witnesses.”
“The justice system does not function without witnesses. They are essential to the foundation of a fair trial. Without witnesses, the truth about an incident will never be found. Witnesses should be protected at all costs and threatening them should be sanctioned swiftly and severely,” the government’s memo began, seeking a punishment between 100 and 125 months — roughly eight to 10 years — of prison time.
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Prosecutors said that the FBI paid a visit to Bush at home after the government cooperators — fellow gang members — reported the witness retaliation.
“Bush told law enforcement that he made the post because the individuals were ‘telling’ and took the post down,” the government memo said. “After the visit, Bush proceeded to have a Facebook Messenger exchange with a cooperating witness where he told the cooperator, ‘All rats must die.’”
Prosecutors said Bush knew this was a “credible threat and not just idle chatter.”
The defense, on the other hand, argued Bush “idly threatened violence against them [the cooperators] because ‘they all told.’”
“Nowhere, for example, does the government accuse Mr. Bush of retaliating against cooperators for the purpose of preventing their testimony at a future trial,” the defense said. “Rather, the government focuses on the ways in which Mr. Bush retaliated and threatened to retaliate against certain cooperators for having appeared before the Grand Jury in the past.”
Bush, through his lawyer Lisa Wood, specifically objected to the allegation “that he is the ‘top shorty’ of the Goonie Boss street gang.”
Claiming he was remorseful, the defendant said he didn’t repeat the “All rats must die” message until the cooperator he sent it to “goaded Mr. Bush by claiming that Mr. Bush’s brother was a snitch.”
The defense said that a message the cooperator deleted also made reference to seeing Bush’s mom around the neighborhood.
“Given the context, Mr. Bush took this message as a threat against his mother and responded emotionally. The cooperator then reacted with a laughing face emoji,” the defense memo continued. “In short, Mr. Bush wishes to clarify that this Facebook messenger conversation was not an attempt by Mr. Bush to harass or intimidate the cooperator on top of the retaliatory Facebook post. Rather, the conversation, which was initiated by the cooperator, was very much two-sided and is more appropriately described as two young, immature men going tit for tat and making idle threats against one another.”
The defense, asserting that Bush’s “history of substance abuse and trauma likely exacerbated his poor decision making,” asked for 46 months in prison, just under four years.
In the end, the judge on Aug. 30 settled on a sentence somewhere in the middle: Six years.
Read the sentencing memoranda filed by the prosecution and defense here and here.
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