A woman was mugged Tuesday afternoon on the block where Mayor Emanuel lives in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the North Side.
The 50-year-old woman was unloading a bag from her parked vehicle in the 4200 block of North Hermitage a few minutes after 1 p.m. when a male walked up from her behind and demanded her property, according to Chicago Police.
The male had gotten out of an older model car, which also had three other males inside, police said.
The male pushed the woman and took her bag before getting back in the car and heading north, police said.
The woman refused medical attention. No one was in custody as of Thursday afternoon.
The broad daylight mugging on the mayor’s block comes less than two years after Emanuel’s son, Zach, was also a robbery victim just a few doors down from his home.
But, with homicides and shootings surging by 50 percent and alarming increases in other violent crimes, the mayor was careful not to look like he was concerned about crime only in his own neighborhood.
“As somebody who has a son that was also robbed and mugged—wherever it happens concerns me and I know about the issue on a personal level,” Emanuel said Thursday.
The mayor noted that he had just come from the funeral of the son of a police officer.
“We are a better city than what we’re seeing. We have bigger hearts and a bigger spirit. As it relates to public safety, it’s not about something around my house. It’s something that happens in our city and, wherever it happens, I have concern,” Emanuel said.
The mugging of Zach Emanuel, which touched off the internal police investigation, occurred shortly before midnight on Dec. 19, 2014.
It happened just days before the mayor and his family left on another one of their exotic Christmas vacations – this time to Chile. It was a particularly poignant trip, since it would be Zach Emanuel’s last before going off to college.
The mayor returned from the trip and made his first public comment about the attack. On that day, he said Zach was talking on a cell phone with a college counselor when he was jumped from behind by two unarmed men. The mayor reported on that day that his son was “doing fine, but I can’t say the same about his parents.”
In a follow-up interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Emanuel was open about the anguish he felt after learning about the attack.
“Your most basic instinct as a parent is to protect your child and there they are only 50 feet away from your house. … You want to protect your children. You also have to give them independence. There’s that inherent conflict,” the mayor said then.
Days before the only arrest in the case, the mayor said, “I’m hoping they find him soon because I’m not sure Miranda rights is something I believe in right now. I say that as a joke.”
The rage the mayor felt about the young men who mugged his son was matched only by the anger he felt when mayoral challenger Bob Fioretti tried to make a campaign issue of, what Fioretti claimed at the time was Emanuel’s failure to press charges in the case.
Fioretti’s comment was a particularly low blow because it fed a rumor mill that had been swirling about the case and questioning the official account.
Eleven police officers were subsequently slapped with one-day suspensions for “inappropriately accessing” police reports about the mugging of Zach Emanuel.
