Before she was attacked, the Grant Park skate park had been a haven for Zoey Wolfe.
“It’s meant that there’s somewhere I can go where I know I’m accepted. As a trans woman in a large city, it can sometimes be very difficult to find places that are accepting,” Wolfe, 25, said.
But as she hung out at the park in late June, the safe spot became the place where a man stabbed her in the chest.
Police arrested Joshua Shaw, 43, shortly after Wolfe was attacked on June 24. Shaw had been leaving the area on a CTA bus when witnesses flagged down officers and pointed to the vehicle, according to a police report. The officers who apprehended him found three large butcher knives in his backpack and witnesses at the scene identified Shaw as the attacker, the report said.
Wolfe credits her friends at the skate park with helping save her life. She’s been visiting the park near Roosevelt Road and Michigan Avenue for almost a year. She goes there to bike, skate and longboard, she said.
Amid the crowd there — a handful of skaters some days, and dozens on others — she’s made a family, she said.
“I found a place that I can fit in, a place that I can grow,” said Wolfe, who goes by the nickname “Alpha” in the park, a play on her last name.
The attack Wolfe experienced had begun to foment the night before, she said. That’s when she said the alleged attacker approached her in a “very aggressive” manner. He shoved her unprompted and aggressively tried to flirt with a 16-year-old girl, Wolfe said.
Back in the park the next day, Wolfe confronted him with friends and asked him to explain his behavior.
He left but returned later, with knives.
As he approached her in the park, Wolfe thought the attacker was trying to fight her. He was shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs, which he had also used before, she said. But she didn’t suspect he would severely injure her with a weapon.
“I honestly didn’t know that he had knives on him until there was one inside of me,” Wolfe said.
The stab to Wolfe’s chest punctured two veins. After she was struck, Wolfe went to her backpack to get a trauma kit she keeps. At some point, she lost consciousness, she said.
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Her friends used the trauma kit to help treat her wound. Two of them kept pressure on her chest to ebb the bleeding, she said. A police officer administered combat gauze to the wound, according to the police report.
Wolfe woke up in an intensive care unit, she said. She had been transported to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in critical condition. She underwent surgery the next day to remove blood from the cavity around her lung, she said.
Prosecutors charged Shaw with one count of assault with a deadly weapon. He is being held at Cook County Jail, according to the sheriff’s office. An attorney for Shaw could not be immediately reached.
The 25-year-old is still dealing with fluid in her lungs, but Wolfe’s biggest concern is the mounting medical bills she’s facing and costs from not being able to work, she said. A friend started a GoFundMe page for Wolfe that has raised nearly $6,000 to cover her medical bills.
“It’s just mainly pain right now. I can’t skateboard. I can’t bike. I can’t do many other things that I would normally be doing. It’s difficult to walk,” she said.
She’s hopeful it will all heal in time, and has recovered enough to have been released from the hospital Sunday.
On her first day out of the hospital Monday, Wolfe went back to the skate park, she told the Tribune while heading there again Thursday.
