A 40-year-old West Side man with a history of mental illness and punching people has been 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. His arrest came 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 the 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 police.
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 a month after his arrest.
The punching attacks are among a series of violent encounters downtown and elsewhere in Chicago 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 charges ranging from theft to assault.
In Chicago, 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, records say.
A mental health evaluation at the Cook County Jail found that he was insane at the time of the attack, suffering from schizophrenia, and had been “disheveled, withdrawn and disorganized” when he was arrested.
But medication made him sane enough to understand the charges against him, records show.
In that case, 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. 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 south of Lake Street. He wore an ankle bracelet because he was on electronic monitoring for a previous assault charge.
But Miller stayed out of jail on electronic monitoring. The judge’s explanation for putting Miller on pretrial release in the milkshake-throwing case was that he had a “very violent history and random violent new charge.”
Miller’s history of severe mental illness and long history of arrests mirrors cases the Chicago Sun-Times found in its “Failure to Treat, Failure to Protect” investigation of a series of unprovoked attacks downtown. The investigation reported that people who are homeless and mentally ill are more likely to be victimized than to hurt anyone but that, in some instances, they commit violent acts, and their lives become a revolving door of jail prison and psychiatric hospitals, with no coordinated treatment.
Another recent random attack made international news. In November, Lawrence Reed — who has dozens of past arrests and 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, Reed also was charged in Cook County criminal court with assaulting other CTA passengers in separate incidents.