A jury of seven men and five women found Tony Robinson guilty late Thursday in the murder of graduate student Anat Kimchi, who was fatally stabbed in an unprovoked attack Downtown.
Robinson, 45, was charged with killing Kimchi by sneaking up on her and stabbing her three times in the neck and back. Jurors deliberated five hours before reaching their verdict.
In the gallery, Kimchi’s mother broke down in tears while relatives and friends comforted her. Both of Kimchi’s parents said they were too emotional in the moment to speak.
Robinson did not visibly react when the verdict was read aloud in court. He faces up 20 to 60 years in prison, prosecutors said. He will be sentenced July 8 in Cook County Circuit Judge John F. Lyke’s courtroom in the Leighton Criminal Courthouse
Kimchi, 31, a University of Maryland doctoral student, was killed June 19, 2021 in the 400 block of South Wacker Drive, just south of Van Buren Street. She was posthumously awarded her doctorate two weeks after her death.
Kimchi was in Chicago to visit a friend. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and she was walking just south of the Willis Tower, looking for a place to read a book.
While prosecutors did not have video evidence of the crime, and no weapon was recovered, they strove to connect the dots for jurors by playing multiple videos, recorded by surveillance cameras, showing Robinson’s whereabouts around the time of the unprovoked attack.
Shortly before the attack around 3:30 p.m., a video showed Kimchi walking south in the 400 block of South Wacker Drive while a man approaches her.
In another video from moments after the stabbing attack, a man prosecutors identified as Robinson can be seen running into the Lower Wacker Drive tunnel holding a knife. Robinson lived in a tent on Lower Wacker.
Another video then shows him throwing an object in the direction of the Chicago River.
Yet another video showed him taking off and discarding his black T-shirt in an alcove off Lower Wacker. Police recovered the shirt, which DNA testing showed was “850 septillion times” more likely to be Robinson’s than anyone else’s.
In their closing argument to jurors Thursday, prosecutors urged them to use common sense in evaluating the video evidence.
Assistant State’s Attorney Meredith Rudolfi told jurors the man seen on video running from the scene was Robinson, who was also videoed numerous times in the days before and after the killing — and was also on police body-camera footage when the cops identified him at his tent.
“None of this is a coincidence. It all adds up to one thing. He did it,” Rudolfi said.
She called it “a sneak attack” Kimchi “could not see coming.”
The random, unprovoked nature of the attack “is horribly sad,” Assistant State’s Attorney Anna Sedelmaier told jurors. “We don’t know what was in his head.”
Kimchi’s murder was one of several shocking cases examined in a Chicago Sun-Times investigation last year into violent attacks Downtown.
According to police and court records, Robinson had a history of arrests and bizarre behavior, including telling detectives “he believes people are following him and tracking his location using their cellphones.”
In the days before Kimchi’s killing, authorities said Robinson struck a woman in the head in the 500 block of South Franklin Street and three days later hit another woman in the head, breaking her nose, and stole her iPhone and cash near Ida B. Wells Parkway and South Michigan Avenue. That woman told police she heard Robinson say, “Are you following me?” before the attack.
Tavon Jones, who was homeless at the time, testified he saw Robinson stab Kimchi in the back of the neck and ran over to try to stop the attack. Jones said Robinson turned to him and said, “You don’t want none of these problems, big bro.”
Jones said he saw Robinson flee toward Lower Wacker. Jones used Kimchi’s phone to call 911 and stayed with her until an ambulance and police arrived.
Jones failed to pick Robinson out of a photo array but later identified him as the killer in a live line-up.
The defense stressed that the live lineup identification came only after Jones had seen the photo array and then gone to Robinson’s tent to confront him, and they reminded jurors Jones’s initial description of the offender did not match Robinson.
During Thursday’s closing arguments, Robinson, dressed in a white button-down shirt, black pants and a white cap, mostly faced the jury and leaned back his his chair.
Earlier in the week, Kimchi’s mother, Chava Kimchi-Sarfaty, testified about how much she misses her daughter, a gifted researcher and animal lover.
Kimchi was drawn to psychology and criminal justice and earned two undergraduate degrees and a master’s from the University of Maryland in College Park before pursuing her doctorate.
Her research focus was on nonviolent offenders who wind up in prison after having their community supervision sentences revoked. Kimchi found significant differences in the severity of community supervision requirements among people of different races and ethnicities.