Shooter in 2007 robbery at The Silo restaurant gets 25 years

As he and the others were being marched toward the back of The Silo restaurant at gunpoint, the bartender testified he knew what was coming.

"I repeatedly thought that this is the Brown's Chicken massacre in the making," Rolf Sandberg said in his victim impact statement. "I decided that if I was going to get shot, I was going to get shot doing something."

Sandberg ran, and the man holding the gun, Charles Knight, 47, fired, leading to the Dec. 9, 2007 botched robbery in which two people were wounded. Knight was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison.

Knight and Kennedy Banks, 48, both of Chicago, went to the restaurant near Lake Bluff to carry out the robbery that police said was planned by restaurant employee Edward Jackson, 45.

After Knight and Banks had a pizza and some drinks, Knight pulled a .40 caliber semiautomatic handgun and began herding the employees and a small group of customers toward a closet.

It was then that Sandberg broke for the door, and Knight fired one shot that passed through the arm of one employee and into the back of another.

"I still have nightmares," the bartender said. "I can still hear the gunshot and the screams of my co-workers behind me."

Both men recovered from their wounds and Knight pleaded guilty to aggravated battery with a firearm and burglary late last year.

Assistant State's Attorney Ari Fisz said Knight, who was captured in Fort Wayne, Ind., almost a year after the robbery deserved the maximum sentence of 37 years.

"He needs to be locked up for as long as is possible because he is a danger to society," Fisz said. "Other people will be hurt if he ever gets out."

But defense attorney Ian Kasper of Waukegan argued Jackson, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison last year, was the more pivotal man in the crime and had a worse criminal record than Knight.

"It was Jackson who came up with the plan and sold it to my client because of Mr. Knight's heroin addiction," Kasper said. "Mr. Knight was doing what addicts do, looking for some money for drugs."

In his own statement to the court, Knight apologized to the victims and claimed the shooting was accidental.

"I didn't go there to hurt anybody," he said. "When people started running, I went to run too and the gun went off because my finger was on the trigger.

Knight appeared before Circuit Judge Fred Foreman in the custody of Winnebago County officials, where he is awaiting trial for murder.

Fisz said Knight is charged with killing a man in Rockford during a 2005 shootout between rival drug dealers, and was on the run from that crime when The Silo was robbed.

Banks has also pleaded guilty to aggravated battery with a firearm and faces a prison sentence of 13 to 17 years. He is due in court April 5.

Foreman said Knight's sentence had to be more severe than the others because Knight actually fired the gun.

"Even though there was a conspiracy here, this defendant caused the most serious harm because he had the weapon," Foreman said.