A 20-year-old Cedar Rapids man who shot at a car carrying two people and was found in illegal possession of multiple firearms has been sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison. Kashad Elijah Hawthorne, tied to a string of armed incidents over a three-week period in 2019, pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a drug user on February 24, 2020.
Hawthorne’s criminal spree unraveled quickly. On May 2, 2019, Cedar Rapids police recovered a firearm from a vehicle where Hawthorne had been riding as a passenger. Just two weeks later, on May 16, officers found a second gun in another car Hawthorne occupied. Evidence presented at sentencing confirmed that Hawthorne admitted to using one of the weapons to fire at a moving vehicle on April 22, 2019—targeting two occupants. No injuries were reported, but the brazen act signaled escalating danger.
Investigators uncovered a pattern of reckless behavior through Hawthorne’s own social media. Photos and videos showed him posing with guns on at least thirteen separate occasions—trophies of a lifestyle steeped in violence. Federal prosecutors emphasized that Hawthorne, a known drug user, had no legal right to possess any firearm, let alone twelve recovered or linked to him during the investigation.
On August 4, 2020, U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams handed down a 100-month federal prison sentence. Hawthorne will serve no parole—standard in the federal system—and must complete an additional three-year term of supervised release upon release. He remains in U.S. Marshals custody, awaiting transfer to a federal correctional facility.
The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyndra Lundquist and investigated by the Cedar Rapids Safe Streets Task Force, a joint unit comprising FBI and Cedar Rapids Police. It was brought under two major Department of Justice initiatives: Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN), aimed at curbing violent crime through targeted enforcement, and Project Guardian, launched in fall 2019 to strengthen federal efforts against gun violence and improve interagency coordination on firearms offenses.
For more details, the public can access court records via the Northern District of Iowa’s electronic filing system at https://ecf.iand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl. The case file number is 19-CR-121. Follow updates from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Iowa on Twitter @USAO_NDIA.
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