A 25-year-old Chicago mother was stabbed to death while riding the subway on Thursday—a fact revealed to her family after photos began surfacing on Facebook.
Jessica Hampton was riding the Red Line through Chicago’s South Side around 12:35 p.m. when the man across from her—whom she was reportedly dating—asked her something, perhaps related to having children.
“He asked the young lady a question, she said no, and he got up and started stabbing her,” one witness told ABC7. “She fell toward the floor and he slit her neck.”
A witness told investigators that “some passengers tried to help,” but the man “still had a knife in his hand so nobody wanted to run up.” The Chicago Tribune adds that Hampton was crying for help, and that
The knife briefly fell out of the attacker’s hand, but he quickly retrieved and resumed the attack. Other people fled the train car, Patterson said.
The woman struggled with the man and fell to her knees. He grabbed her neck and slit her throat and her torso before the woman fell to the floor, according to Patterson. After inflicting the fatal wounds, the attacker stood over the woman and said something, Patterson said.
“As the doors opened on the train, he walked off, stepped over her body and walked off like nothing happened,” Patterson said.
Passengers may not have wrested away the knife, but they did take pictures of Hampton’s lifeless body to post to social media—which is how many of the victim’s family members learned about her death.
“This family was watching that video yesterday, they were looking at the pictures on Facebook that people were spreading, not knowing until 9 o’clock last night it was their loved one they were looking at,” Dawn Valente, a victim advocate, told CBS.
Police responded to several 911 calls once the stabbing was over, though it was a nearby police officer who wound up cuffing the suspect. According to Police First Deputy Superintendent John Escalante, the man was arrested but has not been charged.
“He did go down by himself, and it’s a credit to his bravery and what the men and women of the Chicago Police Department do on a daily basis. He went down on that platform by himself responding to a call of a person stabbed, and encountered the offender by himself. He was able to take him into custody without a struggle, and without any further incident,” he said.
Though it’s unclear whether the two were dating, police confirmed that the dispute was “domestic in nature.”
Hampton, who as a 6-year-old daughter, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Image via Facebook/Ebony