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WASHINGTON — As part of its crackdown on illegal gun trafficking, the Justice Department said Monday it caught a Dallas man who’d illegally bought and sold nearly a hundred weapons, one of which was used in an Arlington murder last fall.
Most came from a single Waxahachie dealer that lost its gun seller license last month.
And the buyer, Demontre Antwon Hackworth, 31, used his Texas license to carry to sidestep the federal background check system. Then, acting as a straw purchaser, he sold these guns — illegally — to buyers who likewise were able to avoid background checks.
“If you put illegal guns on our streets, or into the hands of violent offenders, the Justice Department will spare no resource to hold you accountable,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters Monday at the Justice Department, announcing the indictment.
Hackworth, arrested Friday, faces 35 years in prison: 10 for gun dealing without a license, plus multiple counts of lying to purchase a gun by claiming he was buying it for himself.
According to a June 7 indictment unsealed Monday, Hackworth bought at least 92 guns illegally since 2019, all but five of them handguns, including 9mm pistols and a .40 caliber pistol.
The vast majority came from Triggernometry Arms in Waxahachie, in the last six months of 2021.
Triggernometry Arms has not been charged but did surrender its federal gun dealer license on May 11 to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Some of those guns were used in crimes within seven days of purchase.
One was used in a Sept. 30 murder in Arlington, officials said, tying the gun to the death of Kier Solomon, a 21-year-old Black transgender woman from Dallas. A Skyline High School graduate who went by the name Kiér Laprí Kartier, she was found in her car, shot in the chest in the parking lot of an apartment complex.
That murder took place 55 days after Hackworth bought the gun, said Chad Meacham, U.S. attorney for the Dallas-based Northern District of Texas, who joined Garland at Justice Department headquarters along with the head of ATF’s Dallas field division, Jeff Boshek II.
“Selling to customers who cannot pass background checks allows guns to be used in real crimes against real victims, people whose lives may never be the same,” Meacham said, noting that some of the guns traced to Hackworth were used in multiple crimes. “We may never know how many lives we saved by stopping this defendant’s allegedly illegal gun trafficking.”
With a license to carry, gun buyers do not need to submit to a background check when purchasing individual guns they claim are for personal use rather than resale.
Boshek said ATF agents found Hackworth after noticing a pattern in the last three years as crime guns were recovered around the country and even, “incredibly,” in Canada: nine in the Dallas area, others in Longview, and Baltimore, Md., and four north of the border.
All were eventually traced to purchases made by Hackworth.
“ATF Special Agents scoured the Dallas area visiting Federal Firearms Licensees and discovered the extent of Hackworth’s suspicious purchases,” he said. “Rest assured that we won’t stop our pursuit of those who spread violence and terror throughout our communities.”
It’s illegal to buy a gun on behalf of someone else, or to act as a dealer without a federal license.
Triggernometry Arms’s owners have not been charged with any crime.
Asked why, Meacham said, “They can no longer sell firearms legally in the United States … The investigation continues but that’s where we are at this stage.”
Hackworth appeared in federal court Monday morning. His attorney, Wesley Spencer, said that neither he nor his client would comment.
Solomon’s death caused an uproar among transgender and LGBT activists, who saw it as part of an alarming uptick in hate-inspired attacks.
Arlington police did not respond to requests for comment and have not publicly identified a suspect in her murder.