Carjacking victim says he called 911 while trapped in car with suspect, who asked him for directions

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- A man says his quick thinking helped him escape an armed carjacker who took him on a 2-mile ride and a high-speed police chase.

On Thursday, ABC13 spoke exclusively with the victim, who said the armed man left him with some key opportunities to flag law enforcement -- even letting him keep his phone before the suspect asked him for directions.

Investigators said the man was carjacked at gunpoint after a day of dog walking for work in the Rice Military neighborhood.

"Was in my car maybe a minute and all of a sudden I heard a knock on the window," the victim, James Cichon, said.

The alleged carjacker, identified as 18-year-old DeShawn Johnson, is accused of telling the victim at gunpoint to move over and that they were going for a ride.

Cichon said he was told not to do anything stupid.

"I was like, 'Oh, I'm not going to do anything stupid,'" Cichon told ABC13, saying he immediately called 911. "I just turned my call all the way down so that way no volume was coming out of my phone whatsoever."

Cichon said Johnson, who'd only been living in Houston for the past few months, had a problem. He didn't know where he was going and asked his victim for help with directions.

But as he gave the suspect directions and information about the car, Cichon was also secretly on the phone with 911 dispatchers.

"'We're going to go ahead and keep going east on Fagan. We'll go ahead and pass Durham, and then we'll go ahead and take a left and go north on Shepherd,'" Cichon said he told the suspect. "I told him, 'Don't go too fast over the railroad tracks in this 2006 Gold Lincoln Zephyr. And then we'll go ahead stop at this Circle K gas station here on Shepherd and I-10,' and he didn't seem to pick up on that."

By then, police had a description of the vehicle and an idea of where to find them.

But then, Cichon said the suspect found out he had been betrayed, and and soon after, a chase ensued.

"Then he started saying, 'Oh, you called the cops. You called the cops,'" Cichon recalled. "That's when all of a sudden we were no longer doing 10 to 15 miles per hour down the road. All of a sudden we were doing probably 50 - 60 miles per hour going the wrong direction down a one-way street."

Eventually, the two crashed along the busy Washington Avenue. Investigators said Johnson was arrested.

Now, Chichon's car is totaled. But he said he's thankful for the critical mistakes his kidnapper made and for dispatchers who stayed with the call, and that he was able to keep his cool in a life-or-death situation.

"He made a lot of mistakes. I outwitted the man," he said.

Investigators said Johnson faces several charges, including aggravated kidnapping and robbery.