Woman recalls attack on the L Train: ‘I’ve never been scared like this’
The woman works at a restaurant and rides the “L” all the time and had never been afraid on the trains. But then she found herself in the middle of one of two disturbances by groups of teens on the North Side over the weekend. “I’ve never been scared like this before,” said the 27-year-old woman, who asked not to be identified. “We were just minding our own business. … It was really, really violent.”
The woman said she was returning home with her mother Saturday night on the Red Line after a dim sum dinner when a group of girls got on the train at the Monroe station and appeared to want to pick a fight. “This girl started blowing smoke in my face, and she flicked her cigarette ashes at me,” said the woman. “I said: ‘You need to put that out,’ and the next thing I know there’s all these girls that jumped on top of us.”
They began punching her face and then went for her hair. She believes they had knives or box cutters, and padlocks possibly placed inside socks. “I put my head down between my legs so they would stop beating me in the face, but they were trying to pull my face up and hit me more,” she said. “They ripped out chunks of my hair, and I’ve got a black eye and bruises on my face, and all over my back and shoulder.”
The woman said the attack happened between two stations while the train was moving. “There was nobody to help. There was no time, really. We were surrounded, it happened in one stop, and then they got off the next stop, at Lake,” she said. As the train stopped, the group grabbed her purse, ran off and jumped the turnstile, she said. The woman ran after them, though, and eventually got her purse back and went to the police station to press charges.
Eleven teenagers were arrested around 6:35 p.m. Stephanie Hosch, 18, of 1300 block of North Central Avenue, was charged with two counts of misdemeanor battery. Ten juveniles were charged with battery, and two of them were also charged with strong-arm robbery, Chicago Police Department News Affairs Officer Veejay Zala said. The 11 teens told police they had agreed on Twitter to meet downtown. It appeared that several of those arrested had not met before Saturday, authorities said.
Rape suspect now accused in five attacks in Boston
A “serial predator” is charged with five rapes in a four-month span in a small radius of Boston neighborhoods, authorities said today. Tikee Juan Beverly, 37, of Roxbury was charged Feb. 5 in two rapes, and was indicted yesterday for three additional sexual attacks, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley said today. “The evidence and testimony assembled over the past eight weeks suggests a violent and very dangerous serial predator at work in the area,” Conley said. “These were five cases of chilling sexual violence linked by Suffolk prosecutors and Boston police.”
Beverly, a convicted bank robber being held on $60,000 cash bail, will be arraigned April 2 in Suffolk Superior Court on rape, aggravated rape, robbery, kidnapping and assault charges prosecutors said stem from sexual assaults on women Sept. 13 on Shirley Street in Dorchester; Dec. 27 on Kenilworth Street in Roxbury; and Jan. 11 on Arcadia Park in Dorchester. In addition, Beverly pleaded not guilty last month to charges he raped two women in a building on Washington Street in Jamaica Plain Feb. 2 and 3 after he charmed them into thinking they were rendezvousing for dates.
Roxbury District Court Judge David Poole set bail at $60,000. Prosecutors asked he be held on $200,000. Beverly was linked to the earlier attacks after police and prosecutors undertook a review of reported sexual assaults with unknown assailants. That review is still ongoing and the investigation remains open, Conley said.
Man sentenced to life in prison for Oconee Greenway attempted rape
A man who tried to rape a woman on the North Oconee River Greenway five years ago and attacked one of the people who came to her aid will spend the rest of his life in prison. After listening to three days of testimony this week, a Clarke County Superior Court jury late Thursday afternoon took less then two hours to find 42-year-old Gary Gaylord Ford guilty on all seven counts of an indictment accusing him of crimes committed during a spree that started when he escaped from a state correctional facility in February 2008.
Western Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Lawton Stephens sentenced Ford to life without parole, plus an additional 40 years in prison without parole. The prosecutor in the case, Assistant District Attorney James Chafin, called the evidence against Ford overwhelming. “I think the jury clearly saw all of the evidence, not only the scientific evidence and the police work that was done to collect and preserve the evidence, but what was really overwhelming was the eyewitnesses and the victims who came forward to face the defendant and clearly tell what happened to them,” Chafin said.
Ford’s crime spree began Feb. 6, 2008, when he walked away from the Augusta Transitional Center just months away from parole on a robbery conviction in Athens-Clarke County. That same day, he hitched a ride with a woman in Wilkes County. When the woman told Ford she had to let him out because she wasn’t going to Athens, Ford slammed the woman’s head into the steering wheel, causing her to lose control and crash, Athens-Clarke police said.
Ford punched out a man who stopped to see what was wrong, then stole the man’s pickup truck and drove to Athens, where police said he robbed the Corner Market on Hull Road. Two days later, Ford assaulted a 21-year-old University of Georgia student who was out for a stroll on the Greenway with her dog and roommate. The victim’s roommate, who was walking ahead on the Greenway, passed Ford walking the opposite direction then heard her friend scream, the prosecutor said.
“(Ford) didn’t just choke her, he didn’t just punch her, he didn’t just drag her,” Chafin told jurors at the trial’s start on Tuesday. “At one point while she was being choked, (the victim) passed out.” Chafin then went on to tell the jury how Ford violated her with his hand.
DNA evidence leads to rape, kidnapping charges against suspect
A man sentenced in May to four years in prison for exposing himself to a 12-year-old girl and her 11-year-old cousin in a Middleton nature preserve was charged Thursday with kidnapping and raping a 16-year-old girl in January 2012. Marcus O. Singleton, 30, who was free on bail at the time for the exposure charges, was charged after DNA evidence tied him to the rape, according to a criminal complaint filed in Dane County Circuit Court.
Singleton, who is incarcerated at Fox Lake Correctional Institution, was nonetheless ordered held on $20,000 bail after appearing in court on Thursday. A preliminary hearing was set for Wednesday. Singleton is charged with kidnapping, second-degree sexual assault and two counts of bail jumping. According to the complaint, the girl told police that on Jan. 16, 2012, she was having difficulty falling asleep about 2 a.m., so she went outside on to the back deck of her family’s home on Sky Ridge Drive in Madison. While she was outside, a man walked up, grabbed her and threw her over his shoulder, telling her, “Don’t say anything or I will kill you.”
The girl said the man carried her to a car parked on Kottke Drive, undressed her and raped her. She said he then got into the driver’s seat and started to use his cellphone, so she grabbed her clothing and ran home. She said she didn’t tell anyone about the incident until the next day at school.
Manassas rape: Woman sexually assaulted at gunpoint
Police say a Herndon woman was pulled behind a Manassas townhouse at gunpoint and raped late Thursday. The victim, 31, alleges she was walking in the area of Maplewood Drive and Peakwood Court around 11:15 p.m. when she was approached by a man. He pulled out a handgun, forced her behind the townhouse on Vermont Place and raped her. The suspect took off on foot.
The woman was taken to an area hospital for treatment. Joshua Brown didn’t need to read the rape notice taped to his apartment door. He had a front row seat to the aftermath. He says the woman, who was visiting her boyfriend at the Maplewood Park apartments, had parked on the street because the parking pass had expired.
When she opened her car door, a man put a gun to her head and demanded money. He then forced her behind the apartments and raped her. Derrick Belfield tried comforting his neighbor, the victim’s boyfriend. “I know she was scared to death. I’m a grown man able to defend myself. I would have been pretty shaken up, too,” he says. Both men stood on the very staircase where Belfield heard the victim frantically climb and cry out Thursday night.
“I open the door, I hear the young lady. She was all hysterical and screaming and what not,” say Belfield. Belfield ran to the parking lot to look for the attacker. The playground, where the assault took place, is surrounded by townhomes, yet no one heard anything. But it’s just one of the concerns for investigators. “We’ve had other sexual assaults, not in that area, but other sexual assaults where the victim and attacker know one another, so to have a stranger rape is concerning,” says Officer Jonathan Perok of the Prince William County Police.
Filed under: Black on White Violent Crime, Black Violent Crimes
