Tijuana municipal police arrested a 26-year-old man with at least five prior arrests on Friday after he carjacked a Mercedes Benz at gunpoint outside a restaurant in the Cañón Piedra neighborhood.
The suspect, identified as Alexis Jovanny, approached the victim as he stepped out of his vehicle, pulled a concealed firearm, and drove off in the Mercedes. Police located the stolen car minutes later on Vía Rápida Alamar, a major east-west highway in the city’s eastern sprawl, and took Jovanny into custody. Officers recovered the firearm from inside the vehicle.
A Long Criminal Record at 26
Police records paint a picture of a suspect cycling through the justice system for more than a decade. Jovanny’s detentions date back to 2015, when he would have been roughly 15 years old. He was arrested again in 2018 and 2022.
At some point he served time at the Tijuana CERESO, the city’s main state prison, on charges of illegal firearms possession. After his release in February 2024, he was arrested yet again for armed robbery just months later. Friday’s carjacking marked at least his fifth documented encounter with law enforcement.
Case Now With State Prosecutors
The Fiscalía General del Estado (FGE), Baja California’s State Attorney General’s office, has taken over the investigation. Prosecutors will determine what charges to file and whether Jovanny will be held in pretrial detention.
Carjackings remain a persistent problem in Tijuana, Mexico’s sixth-largest city. Vía Rápida Alamar, where police recovered the Mercedes, runs through several colonias in the eastern part of the city that see regular vehicle theft activity. The area sits well away from the tourist zones near the border crossing and Zona Río but is home to tens of thousands of residents.
The speed of the arrest, with officers intercepting the suspect within minutes, points to improved police response times in the municipality. Still, the fact that a suspect with five prior arrests and a prison term was free to commit another armed crime will likely fuel ongoing debate about recidivism and pretrial release practices in Baja California’s courts.
This story was first reported by Punto Norte.