“Restorative justice,” “affordable bail,” a bullet-riddled car and a dysfunctional justice system in Chicago all collided this weekend in Lori Lightfoot’s Murder City USA.
It’s so complicated and messed up that I’m just going to let CWB Chicago (which should be among your daily reads online) explain. Again, from CWB Chicago:
The driver of a bullet-riddled car that fled from police in the Loop and then crashed near the Roosevelt CTA station over the weekend was charged with aggravated fleeing and eluding on Monday. Police initially believed the driver had been shot in the area, but they later learned that the man actually suffered the gunshot wound to his buttocks over a week earlier, according to a CPD statement.
Lavisiea Smith, 21, was ordered held without bail for violating the terms of a narcotics case that he has pending in restorative justice court. Judge David Navarro set bail in the new case at $100,000.
The strange tale began around 7:42 p.m. Sunday when witnesses flagged down a CPD bicycle patrol in the Loop and pointed toward a parked car that had broken windows, a flat tire, and bullet holes in its glass and body, according to a CPD report and Assistant State’s Attorney Daniel Carmody.
Cops watched as Smith allegedly got into the damaged car and drove away southbound from the 600 block of South Wabash. Carmody said a patrol car intercepted Smith’s vehicle, and officers approached it with their guns drawn because they didn’t know if Smith was a shooter or a victim.
When Smith saw the cops coming, he drove over a raised median, traveled on the wrong side of the street, and then ran three red lights on Roosevelt Road before he collided with another car in traffic near the CTA station, according to Carmody. The other driver was not injured.
It was at this point that cops took him into custody and paramedics found the untreated bullet hole in his butt from 8 days earlier. And now they’re finally keeping him in custody.
You can’t make this “stuff” up.
Chicago pols love to talk about how wild and crime-ridden the “Wild West” was in the days of yore. Tombstone doesn’t have anything on America’s largest open-air shooting range otherwise known as Chicago. And Tombstone didn’t have a lick of the gun control all of modern-day Chicago politicians demand.