Mariana and her coworkers from Volaris were hungry. It had been a long flight to Midway Airport on the Mexican airline, and they hadn’t had breakfast.
So, on Nov. 13, 2023, after checking in at their hotel, the young flight attendant and her friends decided to go out to eat and, after that, to do some shopping at Sephora.
“I remember that there were many people because it was shopping season, Thanksgiving was approaching,” she later wrote in Spanish in a victim-impact statement.
That was one of the last happy thoughts she had, Mariana made clear in that court statement.
The Chicago Sun-Times isn’t publishing her full name because she’s a survivor of a violent crime and couldn’t be reached.
Around 2 p.m. that day, as she walked north in the 600 block of North Michigan Avenue in front of the Burberry store, a man with a decades-long record of arrests and a history of serious mental illness was walking toward her.
Bruce Diamond, then 52, had spent part of the previous week at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and had just been discharged. He had picked up a long, white, birch log from an outdoor holiday display in front of the Starbucks at St. Clair and Erie streets near the hospital.
As he neared Burberry, he raised the large limb and hurled it like a javelin.
It hit Mariana in the side of her head. She dropped to the sidewalk, unconscious, blood pouring from her nose, an ear and her mouth.
As people hurried to try to help her, Diamond picked up the birch log again and kept walking. He got to the corner at Ontario Street, then turned and walked back to where Mariana lay on the ground. Police officers rushed over and arrested him.
On Tuesday, Diamond pleaded guilty to aggravated battery with great bodily harm and was sentenced to five years in state prison, minus the 17½ months he’s already spent in jail. The assistant public defender who represented him told Cook County Circuit Judge Anjana Hansen that Diamond “has a long history of mental illness. He’d been hospitalized at Northwestern in the week before this incident. He had just been released from the hospital.”
The Sun-Times followed Diamond’s case in court for about a year as part of an examination of how mentally ill people often fall through the cracks of Illinois’ treatment system.
In court for his sentencing, looking subdued, with his hair cut short and wearing a thin beard, Diamond slumped in his tan jail uniform.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” he said, almost whispering.
He mentioned that his mother died and said, “I got lost.”
Like a yo-yo, Diamond had bounced between Cincinnati and Chicago for almost four decades, causing mayhem wherever he went. At Tuesday’s hearing, the prosecutor cited 24 convictions, mostly for misdemeanors.
The first entry on his rap sheet was in 1989, when he got court supervision for possession of a firearm in Chicago. He was 18. A string of arrests followed in Chicago — assault, battery, theft and public drinking.
It’s unclear what drew Diamond to Cincinnati, but court records there show he was accused of serious crimes including an aggravated arson in 1998. He was found incompetent to stand trial and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment so he could assist in his defense. Records show he got a nine-year prison term in that case.
Some of Diamond’s crimes in Cincinnati involved using rocks as weapons. He bludgeoned a man in the back of the head with one in 2012 and was sentenced to four years in prison. In 2018, he threw a rock through the window of an ambulance in downtown Cincinnati.
That same year, he tossed two microwaves in a vending-machine room in a hospital and threw rocks at a security guard at the county courthouse, landing a 180-day jail sentence.
In 2021, he punched a man in the face in Cincinnati. His lawyers filed a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The case was dismissed.
The following year, Diamond was back in Chicago, arrested for throwing a cup of hot coffee at the neck of a female clerk at a 7-Eleven store in the 200 block of North Dearborn Avenue.
In 2023, once again in Cincinnati, he was arrested for trespassing at a Hard Rock Cafe.
Both of those cases ended up being dropped.
Ongoing ‘nightmare’
In her written statement, Mariana said she has only a vague memory of paramedics bringing her to Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
A Cook County prosecutor told the judge she suffered bruising, swelling and bleeding in her brain as well as a fractured skull. She had to relearn how to walk and eat.
Mariana described painful weeks in intensive care while her family in Mexico appealed to government officials for an emergency visa for her sister so she could come visit. She wrote:
“I felt a lot of despair, enormous sadness, loneliness, fear, frustration, pain because my family was not with me.
“I kept asking myself what had happened to me. I had panic attacks on more than one occasion. I had, and continue to have nightmares.”
The effects of the attack, she said, will be lifelong.
In addition to ongoing physical rehabilitation, she’s had numerous hospital and doctor visits for damage to her vision and hearing. And she will need to take medication her entire life because she was left with three blood clots.
The area of her brain where she was struck is now “dark” on scans, she wrote.
She can’t work and doesn’t know whether she ever will be able to fly again.
“I lost my partner, my safety, my confidence,” she wrote. “I am afraid to go outside. I can’t taste food anymore.”
Her sister Fernanda said in a letter to the judge that doctors said that, if the blow had been just 3 centimeters higher, Mariana would have died or been left paraplegic.
“The question is: how was such an aggressor with [numerous charges] against women free and on a street as busy as Michigan [Avenue]?’ her sister wrote in Spanish, which was translated into English. “It is clear to me that it could have happened to anyone, but it happened to my sister, a Mexican visitor who was going to work, and stayed about a month [in the hospital] in that city, living a nightmare, alone, the first days.”
Mariana pleaded for Diamond to be taken off the street: “This person is a danger to people. He CANNOT be free to hit and destroy people’s lives just like that.
“I give infinite thanks to God for being alive and having this second chance. But it has not been easy to rebuild myself. Do not allow this subject to disgrace someone else’s life.”