A Baton Rouge man who fled police in Baker, Louisiana with a pump shotgun hidden under his vehicle and a handgun with an extended magazine in a bag on his passenger seat has been sentenced to 115 months — more than nine and a half years — in federal prison for possessing firearms as a convicted felon.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Middle District of Louisiana
Marquis Square, 32, of Baton Rouge, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge John W. deGravelles, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Louisiana announced in a release published October 29, 2026. The judge also ordered Square to serve three years of supervised release after prison and ordered the firearms involved to be forfeited. Independent coverage of the sentencing confirms the 115-month term, the supervised-release order and the forfeiture.
Source: WiseVoter
The chase from Baker to Baton Rouge
According to admissions Square made as part of his guilty plea, on September 4, 2024, officers with the Baker Police Department were dispatched to Lavey Lane in Baker, a small city just north of Baton Rouge in East Baton Rouge Parish, for a disturbance possibly involving weapons. When officers arrived, they encountered Square standing near a vehicle — and found a pump shotgun underneath the vehicle.
Once Square understood he was being detained, prosecutors say, he resisted officers, ignored their verbal commands and quickly fled in the vehicle. Baker officers pursued him into Baton Rouge, where he crashed the vehicle. The flight did not end there: Square ran from the crashed vehicle on foot and was finally captured behind a nearby residence. A search of the vehicle then found a black bag on the passenger seat containing a handgun and an extended magazine.
The shotgun was recovered underneath the vehicle at the Lavey Lane scene in Baker. The handgun, with an extended magazine, was found afterwards in a black bag on the passenger seat of the vehicle Square crashed in Baton Rouge — the two firearms at the centre of the federal case.
A record that already barred him from guns
Federal law bars people with felony convictions from possessing firearms or ammunition, and Square's record is central to the case. Before the September 2024 chase, he had been convicted in East Baton Rouge Parish in 2015 of simple robbery, and in 2024 of attempted possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and of taking contraband to and from penal institutions. In other words, the Justice Department says, he had already been convicted once before for the same kind of conduct — a felon possessing a firearm — in the same year as the chase.
U.S. Attorney Kurt L. Wall praised the work of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Baker Police Department and the Baton Rouge Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Will Morris, who also serves as the office's Criminal Chief, led the prosecution.
Why cases like this go federal
The prosecution was brought under Project Safe Neighborhoods, the Justice Department's nationwide violent-crime initiative, which pairs federal prosecutors with state, local and tribal law enforcement in each of the country's 94 federal districts. The Justice Department says the program — a key component of Operation Take Back America — concentrates federal firepower on the most serious, readily provable offences, including repeat felons caught with guns, precisely because a federal felon-in-possession charge carries a long prison term and removes the defendant from the community for years at a time.
What happens next
Square will serve his 115 months in federal prison — a system with no parole — and then spend three years on supervised release, during which federal probation officers can return him to court if he breaks the conditions of his release. The firearms in the case have been ordered forfeited. The sentence closes a case that began with a disturbance call on Lavey Lane in Baker in September 2024 and ran through a two-city police chase, a crash and a foot pursuit before it ever reached a federal courtroom.