An alleged ‘Loop puncher’ arrested in Chicago

Yara Afaneh scrolled through her phone on the platform of Loyola CTA Red Line station Tuesday afternoon when a man approached and said “Excuse me Miss”.

Afaneh, 23, did not look up, but when she noticed that he was not wearing shoes, she said that she had a bad feeling and started to move away. It was then that she said that the meeting would have become violent.

“From nowhere, he just struck me at the back of the head,” said Afaneh in the stands on Wednesday. “I still have a headache right now.”

A police spokesman said that the man – later identified as Derek Rucker, 37, from Blue Island – struck Afaneh with a closed fist. He was arrested on Tuesday around 1:15 p.m. in block 1200 on West Loyola Avenue and accused of two battery counts, police announced.

He is at least the second man in recent months of having been accused of having struck people at CHICAGO at random. Many people claim to have been victims of a “loop punker” in articles on social networks, notably Instagram, Reddit and Tiktok, although it is not clear how many authors are.

THE video AFANEH posted on Tiktok of the arrest of Rucker has been seen hundreds of thousands of times. Afaneh said she had heard of similar assaults on social networks, but did not expect it to happen to her.

“But once (the attack) occurred, I guessed that it was definitely (the loop puncher),” she said.

Last month, CBS Chicago shared a history About two women who, in separate cases, have been struck by William Livingston to Lincoln Park and The Loop. Livingston was sentenced to Cook County prison while waiting for the trial. The files show that he pleaded not guilty to battery charges for crime.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Transit Authority said in a statement that the “security and security” of runners and employees was “absolute priority”.

“When the CTA was alerted to this incident, we immediately made surveillance images to help the Chicago Police Service in their investigation,” the statement said. “We have also published a bulletin to our security staff and the application of laws to identify the suspected person.”

Until now this year, around 230 assault or battery have been reported on CTA train platforms, according to city data. They are most frequently reported to Clark / Lake, 69th St. Red Line and 79th St. Red Line Stops.

Cook’s county court files show that Rucker has been arrested more than two dozen times in the past 20 years. Several judges have ordered mental health assessments.

Rucker faced charges of attack on police officers, Corte’s County prison staff and hospital nurses, according to the files.

In 2014, he pleaded guilty to an aggravated battery of a police officer and was sentenced to three years in prison. He pleaded guilty in 2023 for resisting a police officer and was sentenced to another year in prison.

Rucker pleaded guilty in 2024 to the aggravated battery of a nurse, according to the files. In November, he was sentenced to a year of probation, but he was arrested again two weeks later after the CPD police had seen him attack a 62 -year -old man in River North. Rucker was accused of battery, although the provision of this case was not immediately clear.

The public defender’s office said he had not been appointed to represent Rucker for recent battery charges from Wednesday afternoon. It was not clear if he had obtained another lawyer. Rucker could not be joined to comment.

After the punch, Afaneh said that she had immediately called 911, while her attacker went to a neighboring bench alone. She said the police showed up in about 10 minutes and arrested her. She decided not to go to the hospital, but always has a headache one day later, so that she can do an exam soon because she “wants to risk anything”.

Afaneh added that the police later informed him that even if Rucker was currently in the hospital, he would be released until his next hearing date on October 30. It was an update which, according to Afaneh, made it “uncomfortable”.

“It sucks a little because it is as if several people said that they went to the police when he was arrested, and they told him that I saw him around Loyola, I saw him in this neighborhood,” she said. “I stay there, and I take the train every day to go to work, and now I feel really uncomfortable.”

Savanna Wood, 30, has also published a Video Tiktok now viral After she was struck in the face by a man at the Addison Red Line stop on September 20 around 2 p.m. when he went to Wrigleyville. Wood did not report the attack on the police. She said she had been disconnected several times when she called the non-urgency number.

When she got out of the train and looked on the left to find the stairs to go out, a man hit her in the face, near her right eye. The brothers and sisters of Wood and her boyfriend, who were with her, saw her fall back and were “amazed for a moment,” she said.

Wood said she had immediately left the platform because she didn’t want to cause another attack. The man – who wore a “bright yellow shirt” and a “really ample pants” and wood described as “delected” and “very large and large” – mounted on an incoming train. She ended up with a black eye eye.

No one was charged in his attack.

“It was the fastest and most subtle way of being attacked that I could probably have dreamed of,” she said. “But it could have been much worse.”

Although she encourages women to be alert, she wants people to understand that there is sometimes not much that someone can do to prevent an attack. Wood moved to Chicago a few months ago for a new job at the Northwestern University.

“When you are in overcrowded situations and someone heads for you, it is not even as if they were approaching you, it is because they pass in front of you. And that is how something like it happens,” she said. “I replayed this moment in my head 100 times, and there is not a single thing that I could have done to prevent it.”