{"id":405246,"date":"2025-11-26T05:27:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T05:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/405246\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T05:27:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T05:27:10","slug":"blue-line-arson-leads-to-questions-about-electronic-monitoring-procedures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/405246\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Line arson leads to questions about electronic monitoring procedures"},"content":{"rendered":"

An arson on the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line train last week<\/a>\u00a0magnified a systemic failure that may have allowed the attacker to be on the streets.<\/p>\n

The suspect, who has an extensive criminal history, violated his electronic monitoring, or ankle bracelet, rules. The state’s attorney now said they didn’t know about the violations until after it happened.<\/p>\n

The victim in the attack, Bethany McGee, 26, was identified by her family through a GoFundMe. Her family is asking for privacy, but says she is sensitive, caring, intelligent, and imaginative.<\/p>\n

Lawrence Reed, 50, is in custody awaiting trial, but he wasn’t before last week.<\/p>\n

Reed was previously arrested over 70 times and was on an ankle monitor with a curfew after an alleged violent attack in August on a social worker at a psychiatric hospital.<\/p>\n

McGee was attacked on the Blue Line. Her family said she is a beloved daughter, sister, and a good friend, quick to include others in conversations and make them feel welcome.<\/p>\n

They said she loves living in Chicago and was on the CTA last Monday night when she was attacked. It’s a place and time Lawrence Reed, the man accused, should not have been.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He was on an ankle monitor, and a report read that he violated his curfew five times in the days leading up to the attack, even on the day of.<\/p>\n

“He had multiple violations where the pretrial people knew he was in violation, a couple times overnight, and yet there was no process out there to take him into custody for these violations,” said CBS Chicago legal analyst Irv Miller.<\/p>\n

Many of the violations were escalated alerts where Reed was out for hours, sometimes overnight.<\/p>\n

Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans addressed Reed’s electronic monitor in a letter<\/a>. In it, he says their pretrial services division gets 8,500 electronic monitoring alerts a week.<\/p>\n

One immediate change the chief judge wants to make is to report all of those alerts to the state’s attorney’s office, which they were supposed to be doing. However, they said those were paused when the state’s attorney’s office raised concerns about the number of alerts they were getting.<\/p>\n

The State’s Attorney’s Office said that they reject the letter, calling it “shameful.”<\/p>\n

In an email, they say they were not notified of Reed’s violations at any point in the week leading up to the attack and were only notified on Nov. 19, after the attack.<\/p>\n

“There has to be a meeting between pretrial services, the state’s attorney, and any other stakeholders that are involved in this process, including the sheriff of Cook County,” Miller said.<\/p>\n

Miller said that the fault lies with the lack of communication in the judicial system, and that Reed had multiple chances to get in front of a judge before the attack on McGee.<\/p>\n

The state’s attorney said they did try to get Reed detained back in August this year for an aggravated battery charge but the judge put him on an ankle monitor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An arson on the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line train last week\u00a0magnified a systemic failure that may have…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":405247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[155773,960,54650,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-405246","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-blue-line","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-chicago-transit-authority","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115614347659463634","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}