Last weekend I wrote about a disturbing story out of Chicago involving a deranged man named William Livingston. Livingston has been arrested at least 20 times and on several occasions those arrests involved random attacks on women walking down the street. One of those attacks happened over the summer and Livingston was identified in a lineup by his female victim after she was punched in the face and sent to the hospital.
But despite having an ID, Livingston wasn’t charged. Police just let him go which meant that he was still wandering the street in September when he committed another attack on another complete stranger. VIdeo shows Livingston snuck up behind Kathleen Miles and punched her in the face hard enough to knock her out. She wound up in the hospital with a broken nose and fractured facial bones. But this only happened because Livingston was allowed to walk after the previous attack.
Why are deranged criminals allowed to walk Chicago’s streets when they could be behind bars?
Monday of this week an even more shocking example of this pattern emerged. A 26-year-old woman riding the train was set on fire by a stranger.
A woman is in critical condition after she was set on fire while riding the “L” train system in Chicago, police said, and the suspect is still at large.
The woman, 26, was riding a Chicago Transit Authority train on Monday night when she got into an argument with an approximately 45-year-old man, police said in a statement.
The verbal altercation turned physical when the man poured a liquid on the woman and ignited it, causing the woman to catch on fire, police said. It is not clear what liquid the man poured on the woman.
When the train stopped, the suspect fled the scene while the woman set aflame exited the train and fell to the ground, police said.
If this story sounds familiar, that’s probably because there was a similar incident in New York City last December. The victim in that case was a homeless woman named Debrina Kawam. She died from her injuries. The person responsible was an illegal immigrant named Sebastian Zapeta-Calil. He told police he’d been drinking so much that he didn’t even remember setting the woman on fire.
In the Chicago attack, the victim was taken to a local hospital and is still in critical condition. A person of interest in the attack has now been arrested.
A person of interest was in custody on Wednesday after a 26-year-old woman was set on fire and left in critical condition while riding a Chicago L train in the city’s busy Loop area earlier this week, the authorities said.
The police did not name the person of interest, and said they were still investigating.
The suspect hasn’t been identified but a local news outlet says the man being questioned has a long history of arrests. In fact, he was only on the street because he was given a pass for an earlier assault in which he knocked out a female social worker.
The man being questioned by Chicago police, suspected of setting a woman on fire as they rode a Blue Line train in the Loop on Monday night, was walking the streets only because a Cook County judge refused to keep him in jail after he allegedly knocked a social worker unconscious at a west suburban psychiatric hospital, court records show.
Rather than detaining the man, who was deemed too dangerous for a psych ward, the judge rejected prosecutors’ requests in August to keep him safely locked in jail. Instead, she sent him home on an ankle monitor. And while clerk of court entries indicate he was on “24/7” electronic monitoring, paperwork shows the judge actually allowed him to leave his home from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays.
And of course this wasn’t his first brush with the law.
In 2022, the attack suspect pleaded guilty to setting a sizeable fire that damaged the exterior of a government building in the Loop, court records show. A judge sentenced him to two years of “mental health probation.” While on that probation, he was arrested three times for misdemeanors, including twice for battery. Prosecutors dropped all of those cases, and he completed probation “satisfactory.”
Just another deranged individual given pass after pass by the system. And in this case it may result in a young woman’s death. He was too dangerous to be in the psych ward but not too dangerous to be walking the streets.
There was another arson attack on City Hall last Friday night. Mayor Brandon Johnson made a statement about this, suggesting the fire might have been a political statement.
But police are now considering the possibility that the City Hall arsonist is the same man who set the woman on fire Monday night.
Police sources told ABC7 that they are looking if this person of interest is connected to a fire that broke out at City Hall on Friday.
A source said surveillance video shows a general similarity in appearance that has prompted detectives to obtain better video to see if it is, in fact, the same person.
I think there’s a lesson here which will be obvious to everyone with the likely exception of Mayor Brandon Johnson and the judges who keep releasing this deranged criminal. Stop releasing these people back onto the street. The justice system is not solely intended to given 2nd, 3rd and 12th chances to deranged people. It’s primarily intended to protect the public. So protect the public by taking these men who commit random violent crimes off the street for as long as possible. It should not take 20 arrests and someone nearly dying before someone in a position of authority decides this is a real problem.
Update: The suspect has been ID and is now facing federal charges.
Lawrence Reed, 50, was charged with one count of committing a terrorist attack or other violence against a mass transportation system on Wednesday out of the Northern District of Illinois in connection with the Monday night attack…
Surveillance footage captured the moment Reed walked through the train car while holding a bottle and approached the victim, a 26-year-old woman with her back towards him. He then poured liquid over her head and body and attempted to ignite it, according to the criminal complaint…
Retracing Reed’s steps, investigators found surveillance footage of Reed at a gas station convenience store shortly after 9 p.m. on Monday evening. That footage showed he filled a small container with gasoline at a gas pump, then went to a blue line station nearby, according to the complaint…
While he was being transported to a detective division, reed “made repeated spontaneous and unprompted utterances, specifically yelling ‘burn b—-’ and ‘burn alive b—-,’” according to the filing.
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