They’ve become known in Chicago as the “punchers.”
Social media recently spotlighted two men accused of unprovoked attacks on women in Chicago.
The attacks are the latest in a series of violent encounters that have raised concerns about how the criminal legal system addresses the mental health of violent repeat offenders.
One video — which has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people on TikTok — shows a man identified as Derek Rucker sitting on a bench on the CTA’s Loyola Red Line L platform after he allegedly hit a woman on the back of the head last month.
Another man, William Livingston, also has been in the news, as a suspect in similar attacks in the Loop and Lincoln Park.
Livingston, 32, was arrested Aug. 19 and is being held in the Cook County Jail, facing felony charges of aggravated battery.
Rucker, 37, was arrested Sept. 30 and released on a misdemeanor battery charge. He’s in jail after being arrested again this month and charged with felonies in more punching attacks.
Rucker and Livingston have been in and out of mental treatment and jail for crimes that repeatedly included punching women in the head.
Such cases were the subject of the Chicago Sun-Times’ “Failure to Treat, Failure to Protect” series earlier this year, examining how men with violent backgrounds and histories of serious mental illness or delusional behavior repeatedly cycled through jails and hospitals — sometimes for decades.
Rucker’s mother Tracey Davis called her son’s saga through hospitals and incarceration a “revolving door.” His schizophrenia was never fully addressed, she says.
“He needs help,” Davis says. “He needs dire help.”
Most people with severe mental illness are more likely to become a victim of violence than hurt anyone else. But for the small group of mentally ill, violent repeat offenders and their victims, the social safety net is full of holes, experts say.
That appears to be the case with these “punchers.”
Livingston, who has been arrested at least 14 times since 2012, has been convicted five times for attacking cops, sometimes threatening to kill them. He’s also been charged with punching women in the face in at least eight cases.
In the latest, Livingston is accused of cold-cocking Kathleen Miles of Lake Villa in the head in August. Miles, 56, who was walking to a train downtown, fell to the sidewalk, unconscious.
Earlier this month, Miles returned to her job as an executive assistant, working from home as she recovers. She recently tried driving for the first time since the attack.
She wants her attacker to get a maximum sentence — but also lasting mental health treatment.
“I don’t believe he’s going to stop,” Miles says. “He’s escalated in his intensity. And I do believe that the next person is most likely going to be worse than the injuries I sustained, if not killed.”
‘It’s tragic’
In 2017, after Livingston was arrested for punching a woman in the face, the Chicago police said he was acting irrationally and placed him in a cell under observation. Later that year, he was arrested on a warrant and kicked the lockup keeper in the groin. He was taken to Roseland Hospital on the South Side and given “treatment and meds,” according to the police.
In 2018, a mental evaluation was ordered in connection with his assault of a police officer, for which he received probation. A clinician wrote that she couldn’t complete her exam because Livingston refused to cooperate and was “oppositional, resistant and evasive.”
In 2022, Livingston went on a rampage in downtown Chicago and the South Loop, punching four women in the face in unprovoked attacks. He was sentenced to five years in prison, minus the three months he spent in a jail unit that provides psychiatric care.
Miles, the woman he’s accused of attacking Aug. 19, is upset about the cycle of violent people held for short periods and put on medication, then discharged with little or no follow-up.
At Livingston’s court appearance in her attack, one of his 2022 victims approached Miles to offer support.
“I really feel that the system has failed him on so many levels,” Miles says. “You know, they treat him like, ‘Oh, you’re a good boy. Now, go out, and do your own thing again.’ And he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He has no guidance. He has no support. He’s left to just hang in the wind, to hurt another person. It’s tragic.”
She says it was “devastating” to learn so many other women were attacked by him.
“In my mind, I thought that there was parole, there was probation, something that the system had in place to kind of keep track of how [offenders] were doing post-release, and he would have been immediately remanded to custody if he had broken any of those rules stipulated in a release, which isn’t the case.”
The Cook County public defender’s office won’t comment on Livingston and Rucker but says it agrees the system needs an overhaul: “Access to mental and physical health care is directly related to lower rates of violence and property crime, yet it is often neglected in our conversations about public safety in this country. Unfortunately, the federal government is doing the opposite of investing in America’s health and safety by cutting life-saving funding to hospitals, community groups and Medicaid.”
Another puncher
Rucker, the other accused puncher, has been arrested at least 15 times since 2006. He was sentenced to prison for two different attacks on cops. He also has been accused of punching seven other women in the head.
One was Dhameera Muhammad, punched in the face by Rucker in 2023 as she stood near State and Hubbard streets smoking a cigarette and waiting for her Uber.
“I turned around, and next thing I knew, the back of my head hit the building,” Muhammad says. “He just punched me and took off. I yelled out, ‘What the hell?’ “
In the most recent cases, Rucker is charged with punching a woman Sept. 21 near the Belmont Red Line stop and another woman Sept 30 at the Loyola Red Line L stop.
He was on probation for striking a nurse at a hospital in 2024, court records show. In that case, the Cook County Adult Probation Department evaluated him and recommended against letting him join its mental health unit’s probation supervision program because of his “steady history of aggression and violence.”
Mark Heyrman, a public policy committee member with the organization Mental Health America who’s retired from the University of Chicago’s law school, says that raises an important question: “What do we do if this guy is so dangerous that he’s not suitable for adult probation? Did they fix him while he was in jail? I doubt it.”
After the Sept. 30 attack, Rucker asked to be taken to St. Francis Hospital for psychiatric treatment but then swatted an officer as he struggled to free himself from bed restraints, according to a police report.
He was released from custody and later punched a woman in the face Oct. 8 at the Wilson Red Line L stop and another woman Oct. 9 at the Grand Avenue Red Line L stop.
On Oct. 10, a judge ordered him jailed pending trial, saying Rucker’s “efforts to address his mental health on his own have been unsuccessful” and that no conditions of release could “mitigate the risk of sudden and escalating conduct.”
Rucker graduated from Morgan Park High School and took some college classes but couldn’t hold a job for longer than a year, court records show.
His mother says he first showed signs of schizophrenia in his early 20s and has been hospitalized at least 40 times. His behavior ranged from punching holes in walls to relieving himself on the L to walking around the city in bare feet, according to Davis.
She says her son was prescribed three mental health medications but told authorities that he didn’t take them after he walked out of jail or the hospital.
“I’ve reached out to at least over 20 or 30 facilities,” Davis says. “He needs to be in a mental facility.”
She says she prays for her son and is sympathetic to his victims. She’s seeking legal guardianship for her son, which she hopes will give her a say in what happens.
“He needs mental care combined with drugs,” she says. “I definitely don’t want him to hurt anybody, and I don’t want anyone to hurt him.”
Heyrman says it seems that Rucker might have been a candidate for involuntary civil commitment after he left jail.
“The real question is what happens when he’s done with his criminal justice involvement — [with] either of these guys,” Heyrman says.
Some state courts in Illinois are exploring greater use of outpatient involuntary commitment. Under this rarely used state legal process, people with severe mental illness who are dangers to themselves or others can be ordered by a judge to get supervised treatment in the community.
Though it’s cheaper than incarceration, it requires a functioning mental health system and the help of the legal system — something Heyrman says is lacking.
Muhammad says the recent viral videos evoked bad memories of her own punching attack. But she hopes the spotlight will bring attention and funding to a difficult problem she says has been ignored for too long.
“It’s going to be a very, very long time because that’s not something that’s an instant fix,” she says. “But I’m happy that it’s getting the attention that it’s getting.”