Surveillance Pictures Released in Mob Attack on CTA Red Line
Bernie Tafoya, CBS Chicago, June 13, 2012
Chicago Police hope surveillance pictures help lead them to one of three weekend mob attacks on people downtown.
As WBBM Newsradio’s Bernie Tafoya reports, around 10:30 p.m. Saturday, a 23-year-old man was beaten up on the CTA Red Line near the State-Lake stop Saturday by a group of about six teenagers.
The teens had just stolen the man’s 27-year-old female friend’s iPhone 4S. She had dropped the phone, and a teen had picked it up and taken it for himself.
The man told the teen to give his wife her iPhone back. But they instead began punching him in the face.
The group then fled the train at State and Lake streets, near the Chicago Theatre.
Another woman with the group, from West Chicago, tells the Aurora Beacon-News it was the scariest night of her life.
She tells the paper she and her two friends got on the Red Line at the Addison stop after attending the Brad Paisley concert at Wrigley Field. Near downtown, the group of teens got on, and by the time it was over, the man with the group had a broken bone near his eye and broken teeth, and he was bloodied.
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In the wake of the attack, the Guardian Angels will be helping by passing out fliers at the State-Lake Red Line subway station and elsewhere.
Surveillance photos of alleged attackers.
“We’ll be patrolling the CTA Red Line also, and the subway system, so we’ll be making fliers throughout the week and putting them up, handing them out, and sort of hoping we can jar somebody’s memory, and somebody can recognize that one individual or all the individuals and call the police,” said Guardian Angels Chicago chapter leader Miguel Fuentes.
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Police are looking for one girl and several boys in the Saturday night Red Line attack.
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In a third incident, a 36-year-old man was attacked by a teen mob as he walked home from work along Dewitt Place near Pearson Street in Streeterville.
Police say the man was robbed and attacked by anywhere from 10 to 20 people. {snip}
Since the attack, the man, a doctor at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, has granted an interview to the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass for a column that ran Wednesday. {snip}
The doctor is Asian and the assailants African-American, but the victim told Kass he did not believe race was the motivation for the attack. He told Kass, rather, that the group seemed just to be beating people for fun.
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[Editor’s Note: Below is another report on this story.]
