The nation’s attention was drawn once again to violence in Chicago last week after a man, identified as Lawrence Reed, was seen in video footage dousing 26-year-old Bethany MaGee with gasoline on a city train before engulfing her in flames.
During the random attack, the young woman could be seen attempting to flee her attacker after being covered in the flammable liquid. Reed then pursued MaGee across the train car, shouting profanity and telling her to “burn alive,” before igniting her in flames.
MaGee, the daughter of a professor of Biblical studies and Sunday School teacher, was taken to the hospital with burns that stretched over 60% of her body.
News of the attack did not go unnoticed by the President, who responded with strong words on Tuesday for the judicial system in Chicago, which allowed the attacker with 72 prior arrests to continue roaming the streets.
Trump lambasted “liberal judges” and Chicago authorities for creating lawlessness and allowing crime to run rampant in the city, calling the situation “out of control.”
“This is a very serious thing,” the President stated during an annual Thanksgiving event. “They burned this beautiful woman riding in a train. A man was arrested 72 timesโ72 times. Think of that. And they’ll let him out again, the liberal judges will let him out again.”
The President highlighted that the violence was entirely avoidable and renewed his call for federal troops to be deployed in the city of Chicago.
“But we’re ready to go,” Trump stressed, speaking of the National Guard. “We have a governor that thinks it’s wonderful that only seven people were killed this week… Itโs horrible what’s happening in Chicago.”
“If you look at the crime that’s taken place in Chicago in the last two weeks, just take a look. It’s on the front page of every newspaper,” he noted. “It’s out of control.”
“We’re going to lose a great city if we don’t do it quickly,” the President warned.
Chicago is not alone in the crime spree; the President and others have emphasized that progressive policies in major cities have dangerously allowed violent offenders to repeatedly walk free, creating lawlessness and promoting senseless brutality.
Last week’s attack in Chicago showed striking similarities to the horrific stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian woman who was killed in a random stabbing on a commuter train in Charlotte, North Carolina. The attacker, DeCarlos Dejuan Brown, Jr, was a repeated and violent offender who had been arrested on 14 previous occasions. Brown’s brother vocally decried progressive crime policies, stressing that the 23-year-old’s death could easily have been “prevented.”
โFor far too long, Americans have been forced to put up with Democrat-run cities that set loose savage, bloodthirsty criminals to prey on innocent people,โ Trump stated after Zarutska’s murder. “They control radical left judges, politicians, and activists, and theyโve adopted a policy of catch-and-release for thugs and killers.”
โThis administration is taking a whole-of-government approach to hold these progressive, weak politicians accountable for allowing violent assailants to terrorize our public transit systems,โ said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, calling out what he described as an “epidemic of violence.”
Daniel Cohen, News Director for the Real Life Network, underscored that the increasing violence in major American cities is a symptom of a “spiritual sickness.”
“There is a pattern of spiritual decay,” Cohen stated. “Remember, you get the government you vote for. You might be asking yourself, how is it that voters continue to choose the same failed leadership over and over again? It’s actually pretty easy. It happens when a society abandons God, when it stops distinguishing between good and evil, right and wrong, and when it makes excuses.”
“What does the Bible say?” he continued. “In the book of Judges, chapters 19 and 21, there’s a Levite concubine, and she’s brutally murdered in the streets of Gibeah. If you know the story, her body is dismembered, and it’s sent throughout the land of Israel. That act of savage violence wasn’t just a crime. It was a sign. It was a sign of a moral collapse. It was a wakeup call to a nation that had forgotten God. The Bible says that in those days ‘every man did what was right in his own eyes.'”
“Lawlessness has infected cities because of soft-on-crime policies,” he stressed. “Innocent people aren’t safe when those in authority ignore repeated criminality.”
This violence, Cohen explained, “has to be a reckoning for us, a moment where we stop doing what’s right in our own eyes and when we return to the law and order that once made the United States of America a beacon of light to the world.”
“Matthew 24:12 says, ‘because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.’ This is exactly what we’re seeing,” he detailed. “This is what happens when ’empathy’ becomes a weapon against justice. America needs a lifeline from the toxic empathy it’s drowning in.”
Harbingerโs Pressย is a division of Harbingerโs Daily News Media.
