A woman is in custody after allegedly battering nine people on Chicago’s Northwest Side in a series of assaults, including at least two attacks with a baseball bat, police said.
There were at least six separate attacks, police said. The accounts follow a similar pattern: The attacker pulls up to women walking in Northwest Side neighborhoods, gets out of her white-colored car and batters them with her hands or a baseball bat.
Officers took a woman into custody overnight after video of the alleged attacker battering a mother circulated, police said Wednesday. In the four-second video, the metal ding of the bat rings aloud as the attacker lifts the bat above her head and swings down on a woman shielding an infant in a stroller.
“She was swinging that bat to hurt somebody,” said Shannon Condon, who recorded the brief video and came to aid the victim during the Tuesday morning attack.
Condon had been sitting at a desk in her Albany Park home when she looked out the window and saw a woman get out of her car. The woman approached two other women who were pushing a stroller. They must have known one another, Condon remembered thinking.
Then she saw the attacker pull out a baseball bat.
“And then I realized, this wasn’t a joke,” Condon said. “These women didn’t know this person and they were being attacked.”
Condon began recording as the woman repeatedly swung the metal bat at the victims on the sidewalk in front of her next-door neighbor’s home. She went to help the victims and tried to get the attacker’s license plate as the woman fled in her car.
According to police, both victims declined medical treatment, but the “shocking and scary” attack shook Condon, who is the mother of an infant and a toddler. It was “sort of surreal to see this happening at 11:30 in the morning on a bright, sunny day,” she said.
Just 10 minutes later, as a 45-year-old woman and her young daughter walked down the 4100 block of North Campbell Avenue in the nearby North Center neighborhood, a woman again got out of a white car “and began to chase the victim while holding the bat,” police said.
The attacker eventually caught up to the woman and struck her with the bat, but did not strike the child, police said. The woman fled again. The victim declined medical help, police said.
Two more attacks occurred in quick succession 20 minutes later. First, the same woman attacked two other women in Irving Park on the 3000 block of West Belle Plaine Avenue and moved two blocks north to West Cullom Avenue and attacked another woman, police said.
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The woman attacked on Cullom took herself to Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where she was reported to be in good condition, police said.
Police connected the Tuesday attacks with two similar batteries that occurred Sunday. In the first, a 33-year-old was approached by another woman who was driving a white car in Irving Park just before 3 p.m.
The driver exited the car “and began to batter the victim” on the 4200 block of North Richmond Street, a block lined by houses and an elementary school. The attacker fled and the victim declined medical treatment, police said.
Less than an hour later, an attacker again got out of a white car to batter a 31-year-old woman and a 19-year-old woman near Lawrence Avenue and Pulaski Road in Albany Park. The attacker again fled, and the victims also declined medical aid, police said.
Charges against the woman who police believe committed the attacks are pending, police said. Condon called it a “relief” that the alleged attacker had been arrested and said she hopes the woman is charged and gets whatever help she might need.
“A metal baseball bat, especially with an infant, that could kill them. And it could kill an adult as well,” she said.
jsheridan@chicagotribune.com
