Another public-transit attack by a deranged recidivist, this time in Chicago.
Another public-transit attack by a deranged recidivist, this time in Chicago
A nother innocent, beautiful young woman was viciously attacked by a career criminal on public transportation, this time in Chicago. Twenty-six-year-old Bethany MaGee was set on fire and critically injured by a mentally ill menace who reportedly had — prepare to be appalled — 72 prior arrests. What’s next?
The attack comes just three months after the horror of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska’s brutal murder on North Carolina public transit, allegedly by Decarlos Brown Jr., who had been arrested and institutionalized more than a dozen times. The details of the Chicago attack are tragically similar: On November 17, MaGee was quietly reading on her phone on the Blue Line train when a man doused her body with gasoline. She tried to run away, but the maniac chased her down, with the bottle already on fire, and set her ablaze. The young woman was engulfed in flames but somehow escaped the train before collapsing on the platform.
Thankfully, not every person taking public transit these days is so desensitized or apathetic to violence that they’d rather film it or stare sheepishly (though, in their defense, there’s little incentive to intervene given how Daniel Penny was villainized by New York City prosecutor Alvin Bragg and the media). Bystanders helped MaGee, before she was rushed to the hospital in critical condition.
“My responsibility is to build the safest, most affordable city in America,” Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said at a recent press briefing. “The investments we are making are certainly moving us in that direction. This is an isolated incident, I mean, I don’t see this as some sort of trend.”
Yet the city’s habitual release of suspect Lawrence Reed — who at one point reportedly was being held at a psychiatric hospital — back onto the streets does constitute a trend, at a minimum. Even three arrests by Chicago police would have been a trend. But 72 arrests? That feels like a government conspiracy to terrorize citizens. The criminal justice philosophy of Chicago’s leaders is incompatible with American civil society, which must foster confidence in public safety.
“We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence,” Johnson said in a separate press conference recently. “It is racist, it is immoral, it is unholy, it is not the way to drive violence down.”
We’ve heard this argument before from feckless city officials, and it is abject nonsense — and dangerous. Incarceration removes individuals who’ve broken the social contract by menacing other people. In prison, they pay a penalty for their crimes and are no longer a threat to the law-abiding public.
And since Johnson wants to open that can of worms, the black incarceration rate is overwhelmingly related to rates of crime involving black perpetrators. In 2005, the black homicide rate was more than seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
To explain this discrepancy, Johnson and his radical criminal-justice-reform peers will argue that the whole system is rigged — that police, prosecutors, and judges apply bias to black people accused of crimes. This has served as the justification for rogue district attorneys to impose soft-on-crime policies, such as bail reform, that lower the bar for letting recidivist criminals prowl about the streets again.
After a career felon set MaGee on fire, Fox News asked a commuter for her reaction.
“Were you aware that the individual that allegedly committed this crime was a career offender and had been arrested over 40 times?” Fox asked the woman, who is black.
“I saw it on the news,” she said. “The guy should have been in jail at some point. I mean, he should have been in jail and not able to move. I mean, this guy was carrying an accelerant around.”
Fox asked: “Did you know that [Chicago] Mayor Brandon Johnson said, ‘Oh, this was just an isolated incident’? How does that make you feel?”
“That he doesn’t care,” she replied. “That he blows it off. That he doesn’t think he has to do anything about it. That’s not his job.”
Johnson’s callous dismissal of MaGee’s experience, which likely will leave her permanently scarred physically and emotionally, feels personal to a lot of women who know they’d be just as easy targets. I’m only a year older than MaGee, and I live in deep-blue New York City where I often feel like a sitting duck. Though Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani’s retention of top cop Jessica Tisch gives me some solace, I shudder at the thought of the city’s subways teeming with even more potentially volatile individuals — as the socialist candidate all but promised with his proposal to convert empty MTA retail spaces into de facto homeless shelters.
In a huge step backward, Mamdani just announced that he appointed to his transition team a radical professor who is a documented prison abolitionist. Alex Vitale said on a call with the Democratic Socialists of America that cops are “the natural enemy of the working class.”
Interesting, because the working class are the ones being victimized when the law enforcement system fails. Zarutska was on her way home from her pizza parlor job when she was stabbed to death. MaGee was taking a commuter train when she became the prey of a pyro.
Mamdani, Johnson, and their fellow travelers are making life hell for working people. Their approach to criminal justice is what’s immoral and unholy — and, for young women, terrifying.