Occasionally, a robber chooses the wrong victim and ends up becoming the target. This was the case with a robbery in downtown Chicago.
A 50-year-old woman gave a robber a religious lecture last Friday after chasing him for almost a mile and cornering him in an alley, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The incident occurred shortly after midnight when the woman was riding a Chicago Transit Authority bus in the Loop. Jenar Sanders, 18, grabbed her wallet from her purse, jumped off the bus at Huron and State streets and made a run for it.
The woman began chasing Sanders and alerting others as she ran down the street. A hotel staff member at the Omni Hotel and the CTA bus driver notified police, officers said.
The chase ended with Sanders cornered in an alley off Superior Street between Wabash Avenue and Rush Street. He was surrounded by the victim and others who had joined the chase.
“She kept telling him God didn’t want him to steal her wallet,” a police source told the Tribune.
Sanders is 6-foot-3 and weighs 270 pounds. The woman is 5-foot-8 and a little more than half his weight.
“The woman’s lucky,” a police officer told the Tribune. “She grabbed him. She was lucky this guy wasn’t a violent guy. They had him in an alley without an exit. He’s a fairly substantial man.”
I would agree with the police officer. I had a similar incident occur when I was 18 years old. As I was entering the bank where I worked, a young women tried to steal my purse. I beat her up, dragged her into the bank and left her in the lobby while I and my co-workers hid behind the teller glass window waiting for the police to come. I am not a large woman, but I used to have a lot of sassy spunk.
As I have aged and become wiser, I would now just give up the wallet. First of all, I can’t run as fast as I once could, but secondly, there are far too many violent people out there and it’s not worth losing your life or getting seriously injured. Now I carry pepper spray and an alarm in case I am faced with a life or death situation – in which case I think that 18 year-old spunk would kick in. It was instinctive to fight back, now my instincts would tell me to let it go.
I am glad the woman was not harmed and that others joined in the effort to help her.
Sanders was arrested by two officers at 12:35 a.m. He admitted to the crime and was charged with theft.
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