Good Samaritan who helped couple beaten by teen mob sends message to Lightfoot
CHICAGO - A good Samaritan who stepped in to help a couple who was brutally beaten during Chicago's "Teen Takeover" Saturday is speaking out about the downtown chaos, calling out Mayor Lori Lightfoot for "sugarcoating" the chaos.
Lenora Dennis, who was identified as the woman who stepped in to save a couple under attack by a Chicago mob, pushed back on the city mayor's claim the social media inspired "Teen Takeover" event "wasn't mayhem."
"I’m sorry, Lightfoot. I voted for you… but I can’t be involved in any level of sugarcoating what I saw," Dennis told Fox News' Fox News’ Garrett Tenney. "That was mayhem."
Lightfoot reportedly said the vast majority of young people who descended on downtown came "because it was great weather and an opportunity to enjoy the city.
"That’s absolutely and entirely it," Lightfoot said, according to reports. "There are a few that came with different intentions. They have and they will be dealt with."
But Dennis, who witnessed the chaos first hand, took issue with Lightfoot's response.
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The bystander stepped in to help Ashley Knutson and Devante Garrison-Johnson, with Dennis telling Fox News she feared the couple could be killed if the beating continued.
"I felt like if I did not intervene, that young man would have gotten killed right there," she said. "It was just something that I had to do because I couldn’t accept that.
Knutson and Garrison-Johnson spoke to Fox News Tuesday for the first time since the attack, which was captured in a viral video during the chaotic "Teen Takeover" of downtown Chicago over the weekend.
Garrison-Johnson said he suffered multiple injuries to his body and face after he was jumped by the mob, while the couple shared the harrowing details of how their phones, shoes and Apple Watch were stolen.
Their ordeal could have been worse, the couple said, if not for the aid of Dennis, who came to the rescue despite having never met the couple before. According to Knutson and Garrison-Johnson, Dennis ran up to the mob of people screaming for them to stop the attack and eventually pulled them out of the crowd and gave them shoes and money before driving them to the police station.
In an interview with Fox 32, the couple said they were shopping in downtown Chicago when they ran into "the really big group of people, guys, and girls."
"DJ had my hand trying to lead me through the crowd of people and they pushed him, they pushed me, and as soon as they pushed me I told DJ, ‘They just shoved me,’" Knutson said.
"And he was like, ‘Don’t shove her, who shoved her?’ And as soon as he said that, everything went crazy," she recalled.
"They said they were going to kill us. They turned around and started fighting. I got pushed down to the ground and the whole group went to DJ and not to me," Knutson continued.
While Knutson said she also suffered injuries in the attack, Garrison-Johnson received the bulk of the mob's attention.
"They were jumping him in the middle of the street. It got pretty bad," Knutson told the outlet.
While Dennis agreed with those who came out against condemning the youth of the entire city as a whole, she argued community leaders, the police, and citizens need to come together to make sure situations like the one that unfolded over the weekend don't happen again, recalling the chaos resembled a "war scene."
"It was very frenetic… it was surreal," she said.
Dennis also had a warning to parents in the Chicago community, telling them to monitor their children's social media activity in what type of content they are consuming, arguing some of the city's youth have been "indoctrinated" to believe these types of actions are acceptable.
"They’re getting indoctrinated to do this kind of crazy stuff," she said.
Lightfoot's office did not immediately respond to a Fox News request for comment.