A 40-year-old West Side man with a history of mental illness and punching people is charged with slugging three women in the face in the Loop this week in the latest of a series of unprovoked punching attacks downtown and elsewhere around the city.
Marlon Anthony Miller, 40, was arrested Wednesday morning in the first block of East Randolph Street and charged with felony aggravated battery in a public place. He was arrested minutes after police say he punched a 62-year-old woman, a 50-year-old woman and a 49-year-old woman.
According to a Chicago police report, Miller, who wore an ankle monitor and has several similar pending battery cases, is accused of punching all three women in the face, including one in the nose and another damaging her $800 eyeglasses. They told police they were walking on a sidewalk when, unprovoked, they were attacked.
The women — a 50-year-old from Matteson, a 49-year-old of Tinley Park and a 62-year-old woman from Calumet City — suffered bruising, redness and swelling, according to the report.
Miller’s most recent previous arrest came Nov. 25, when, authorities say, he threw a foam cup filled with a milkshake at a 30-year-old woman’s face in the Loop.
According to police and court records, he’s also charged with having “punched” two women he didn’t know at Randolph and Dearborn streets on Oct. 10 and then knocking over a third woman.
Miller also has been arrested in Evanston and accused of hitting a police officer.
In unrelated cases, two men, William Livingston and Derek Rucker, dubbed “the punchers,” have been accused of hitting women. In November, Rucker was sentenced to seven years in prison one month after his arrest.
The punching attacks are among a series of violent encounters that have raised concerns about how the criminal legal system addresses the mental health of violent repeat offenders.
Miller had lived in Iowa before coming to Chicago in 2018, court records show.
In Des Moines, he racked up dozens of arrests for everything from theft to assault.
On Feb. 26, 2018, he was walking downtown in the 100 block of North State Street when he punched a man in the face, unprovoked, breaking his jaw.
A mental-health evaluation in the Cook County Jail determined he was insane at the time of the attack, suffering from schizophrenia. He was “disheveled, withdrawn, and disorganized” when he was arrested.
But medication made him sane enough to understand the charges against him, a report said.
Miller was sentenced to a probation program to supervise his use of psychiatric medication and regularly test him for illicit drug use.
In recent years, Miller has been arrested repeatedly in connection with other assaults and served several short sentences in jail. Court records in those cases don’t indicate he was evaluated for mental illness.
On Nov. 25, he was arrested after striking a woman in the face with a Potbelly’s cup filled with a milkshake on State Street just south of Lake Street.
He was wearing an ankle bracelet because he was on electronic monitoring for a previous assault charge.
But Miller stayed out of jail on electronic monitoring.
Oddly, the judge’s explanation for putting Miller on pre-trial release in the milkshake-throwing case was that he had a “very violent history and random violent new charge,” according to the order.
Miller’s history of severe mental illness and long history of arrests mirrors cases the Sun-Times profiled in its “Failure to Treat, Failure to Protect” investigation of several shocking, unprovoked downtown attacks.
The investigation found most people who are homeless and mentally ill are more likely to be victimized than to hurt anyone else, but for a small subset of people their lives become a revolving door of jail, prison and mental hospitals with no coordinated treatment to prevent future violence.
Another recent random attack made international headlines.
In November, Lawrence Reed — a man with dozens of past arrests who suffers from schizophrenia and depression, according to his lawyer — was charged with a federal terrorism offense after police said he poured gasoline on a woman riding a CTA Blue Line train and set her on fire, badly injuring her.
Earlier this month, he was charged in Cook County criminal court with assaulting other CTA passengers in separate incidents.