As the crime problem continued to surge across the city of Chicago, one mother just was not going to let her child be a part of said problem and walk away with their spoils. This past Tuesday, one sophomore out of Loyola Chicago held up a Metra Electric train conductor with a gun while he was on his way to school and robbed the conductor of all of his cash. In the wake of the incident, police put forth images of the suspect, who was identified as 18-year-old Zion Brown, which garnered the ire of someone very close to brown: his very own mother.
CBS Chicago issued a report that at roughly 2 p.m. Brown brandished a “black semiautomatic handgun and announced a robbery.” In the wake of stealing the conductor’s cash, the report stated that he “ran off into the station, according to Metra police. Authorities released two photos, one of them showing the man with the gun in hand on the station platform.”
Brown managed to escape with his ill-gotten goods and ditched the gun, which was later discovered to have been just a BB gun. However, while he was able to get away from the station with the stolen goods, he was never quite able to get away from everyone.
As read in various reports, Brown’s own mother identified her son in the photos being displayed on the news and was able to even recognize him through the mask he was wearing. She then took steps to confront her son and turned him over to police officials.
Brown was then charged with robbery and gave his official confession to the crime. As stated by his defense attorney, Brown was just hungry and in need of some money for food. CWB Chicago stated in a report:
The defense attorney said Brown went to class at Loyola after the hold-up. He encouraged Judge Maryam Ahmad to reflect on her days as a hungry college student as she weighed the state’s request to have Brown held without bail.
That argument didn’t sit well with Ahmad, who said she remembered being a hungry college student, but she never considered pulling a gun on someone and taking their money. She granted the state’s no-bail request.
This entire ordeal rides in the wake of a major surge in crime throughout Chicago. Early in January, Chicago recorded the most homicides of any city in the country for 2021 with a horrid 797 total homicides. Said number was even higher than it was back in 2020 by almost 25 and over 299 more than was recorded back in 2019.