The man charged with setting fire to a woman on a CTA Blue Line L train repeatedly violated the conditions of his home detention in a separate criminal case in the weeks leading up to the CTA attack, court records show.
Lawrence Reed is charged in federal court with terrorism, accused of pouring gasoline on a woman and setting her on fire. She was able to get off the train at the platform at Clark and Lake streets downtown. She suffered severe burns all over her body.
Separately, Reed, 50, faces an aggravated battery charge in Cook County criminal court in an Aug. 19 attack at MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn. He’s accused in that case of attacking a social worker while he was a psychiatric patient there.
A judge freed Reed on electronic monitoring.
Court records show he was assigned to stay in at least two shelters.
On Sept. 12, he was ordered to live 24 hours a day at a shelter in the 4100 block of South Princeton Avenue except for short periods on Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Gregory Butler, who runs the transitional housing shelter on Princeton Avenue, said he was notified that Reed might come but that he never showed up to stay there. Butler said he recalls Reed being discharged from a hospital but said Reed’s electronic monitoring placement at the shelter wasn’t approved by officials.
On Sept. 30, Reed was assigned to stay at a second shelter, in the 10000 block of South Avenue N, with the same hours of movement. It’s unclear whether he stayed there or was assigned to yet another address.
A spokesperson for the Cook County chief judge’s office, which operates the electronic monitoring program, wouldn’t comment on a pending criminal case.
But in a new court filing in the August assault case, the pretrial services unit of the Cook County chief judge’s office reported that Reed repeatedly violated his curfew before the Blue Line attack Monday.
Those violations occurred Nov. 9, Nov. 12, Nov. 14, Nov. 15 and at 9:13 a.m. Monday — the day of the CTA attack.
The court filing says two “escalated alerts” were issued because of his curfew violation Monday — at 12:13 p.m. and 12 hours later.
The attack on the train occurred around 9 p.m. Monday.
Nothing in Reed’s court records indicates that his pretrial case officer notified the judge about his curfew violations until Wednesday — two days after the woman was set on fire.
Earlier this year, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart turned over supervision of people awaiting trial on home detention to Chief Cook County Judge Timothy Evans. A source in Evans’ office said pretrial officers don’t provide the same level of supervision as Dart’s office did.
“We do not have any safeguards to verify addresses,” the source said. “Sheriffs used to contact people, go there, do a search. We don’t do that. We take the word of the defendant or anyone else who provides us an address. They could give us a bogus address, and we would not know.”
In April, after Dart transferred his electronic monitoring program to Evans, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke warned her staff that pretrial detainees could go unmonitored. She said pretrial officers in Evans’ office are not law enforcement officers and
“cannot investigate, seek escape charges, or obtain an arrest warrant if a person absconds.”
A judge, on the condition of anonymity, said he’s seeing an increase in the number of people on electronic monitoring coming before him on charges of new violent crimes.