Chicago police are investigating allegations that officers drove past a couple as they were being attacked by a large group of people during chaotic downtown gatherings over the weekend that left two teenagers shot and drew national media attention.
Ashley Knutson, 20, and her boyfriend Devontae “DJ” Garrison-Johnson, 22, were robbed and beaten Saturday night in the 100 block of North Wabash Avenue, police said. No one has been taken into custody for the attack, though 15 arrests were made throughout the night.
After video of the attack circulated online, the couple and a Good Samaritan who helped them said police officers failed to intervene.
“It kind of made me feel like the keys to the city were being handed over to this mob,” Lenora Dennis told the Sun-Times days after helping the couple to safety. “I don’t want to demonize the kids, but at the same time there has to be a level of accountability for the things that they were doing.”
As Dennis watched Garrison-Johnson being assaulted by dozens of people, she said she saw four squad cars speed past and tried to flag down another. “They looked at me, looked at the situation and then angled the car around me and drove off,” she said.
A police spokesperson said the department opened an internal investigation Tuesday into the claims that officers hadn’t stopped to help. The probe was first reported by CWB Chicago, a local crime blog that published the video of the attack.
Knutson, who lives in South Carolina and was visiting Garrison-Johnson, told reporters they were walking through the crowd when she was shoved and her boyfriend came to her defense.
“He turned around and said, ‘Don’t put your hands on her. Don’t push her,’” she told the WMAQ-Channel 5. “And as soon as he said that, everything went crazy.”
The now-viral video shows Knutson screaming as people in the group punch and kick Garrison-Johnson, who was left bloodied and bruised.
The couple — who had their shoes, cellphones and credit cards stolen — also recalled seeing police officers bypass the melee. “Cops drove right by it, acted like they didn’t see anything,” Garrison-Johnson told Fox News.
Downtown Alds. Brian Hopkins (2nd) and Brendan Reilly (42nd) have both criticized the police department’s flat-footed response to the gatherings. Reilly complained that an initial meetup that drew hundreds of young people to Millennium Park had devolved into “chaos and criminal conduct.”
Dennis was leaving Macy’s, 111 N. State St., when she heard Knutson’s screams and saw Garrison-Johnson being beaten on the ground. After unsuccessfully trying to get the cops to stop, she said she was briefly able to disperse the crowd before they returned to continue the attack.
That’s when she pushed the couple into the department store and had her husband pick them up in a rideshare vehicle, which took them all to the Central District, 1718 S. State St. After the couple filed a police report, they were taken to the University of Illinois Hospital for treatment.
Dennis, an Englewood resident who works in the real estate industry, likened her experience that night to “watching a train wreck.”
“It felt like they felt invincible, like we can do this unchecked,” she said of the group that attacked the couple. “And that can’t be the thing that happens in Chicago. That can’t happen anywhere. That’s anarchy.”