A Chicago family is celebrating how a 40-year-old woman and her coworker were able to survive a violent attempted armed carjacking thanks to the coworker and his firearm. 

“If you see all those bullet holes and only one hit my child. That’s a miracle,” Janice Sims, the mother of Jaquita Sims, who survived the armed attempted carjacking, CBS News reported. “Angels covered her. God covered my daughter. Thank you, Lord.”

Early Wednesday morning last week, Jaquita Sims’s car suffered a flat tire as she made her way to O’Hare International Airport amid holiday travel, her mother told the outlet. Her coworker, identified only as a 65-year-old man, offered to give her a lift and picked her up on Chicago’s West Side in his Toyota Corolla. 

“It’s just sad that a person trying to make a living could almost lose their life just trying to make a living,” Sims’ pastor Terrell Stevens told CBS News. “And so those that are out there with gun violence – this is somebody’s daughter. You’re not just shooting at random targets.”

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The corner of Washington Boulevard and N. Kostner Avenue in Chicago, where an attempted carjacking unfolded. (Google Maps)

Four men soon approached the Corolla in a silver SUV at about 4:40 a.m., brandishing firearms at Sims and her coworker and demanding they exit the vehicle, CBS News reported. 

“I started screaming my coworker’s name out,” Jaquita Sims told the Chicago Sun-Times.

A gun fight ensued as the 65-year-old, legally armed coworker pulled out his own gun and used the only five bullets he had to defend himself and Sims, the outlet reported. 

“They wanted to carjack them,” Janice Sims said. “They just shot the car up maybe 20 times.”

The suspects fled, and the 65-year-old drove himself and Sims to a local hospital. Sims suffered a gunshot wound to the chest, while the 65-year-old was grazed by a bullet on his thigh. 

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“All I heard was loud noises after that, and my eyes was closed,” Jaquita Sims told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I heard [my coworker] kept screaming my name, but I couldn’t answer him.”

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Police said the coworker had a concealed carry license and a valid firearm owner’s identification card for his firearm, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. Police said the coworker fired first, though Sims said the suspects opened fire upon seeing her coworker was armed, according to the outlet. 

Both Sims and her coworker have been released from the hospital. 

Chicago police officers in the West Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

“When I see this car and all the bullets on her side of the car, and she was the passenger, and it’s about 20 bullets just on her side,” Janice Sims said. “And only one of them hit her, and it didn’t kill her. Thank you, Lord.”

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Sims’ pastor was joined by strangers and loved ones at West Suburban Medical Center last week in a prayer circle for Sims and her coworker’s health. 

“This family has been saved from a funeral, saved from a burial – just saved, saved, saved,” a man said in the prayer circle.

Fall colors blanket the ground of the skyline of Chicago with Lake Michigan in the foreground in downtown Chicago on Oct. 16, 2022. (Vincent D. Johnson/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Sims’ mom noted that while her daughter was able to survive the violence, another Chicago mother will inevitably answer a more tragic phone call. 

“Somebody else’s mother is going to get the same call that I got this morning – that their child got shot, by the same people, because the guns are still in their hand,” Janice Sims told CBS News. “And they’re going to do it again, and we’ll never know who they are – ’cause they shoot and they run.”

Chicago PD told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that there were no updates on the case and that the investigation into the shooting remains ongoing. 

Chicago closed out 2023 with a drop in homicides and shootings compared to 2022, according to police data, and returned to pre-pandemic levels. Robberies and car thefts, however, have skyrocketed in the city, jumping by 23% and 37%, respectively, last year compared to 2022, WTTW reported.