When Jessica Hill and her sister, Jayla, tried to walk into a shoe store in Chicago on Sunday, a security guard asked the pair to put on masks and use store-provided hand sanitizer.
Instead, prosecutors said, they refused and brutally attacked the guard, with Jayla, 18, eventually grabbing the man’s hair while Jessica, 21, stabbed him 27 times.
The guard eventually escaped and helped keep the sisters in the store until police arrested them. At a hearing on Tuesday, a judge with the Circuit Court of Cook County ordered the sisters to be held without bond on charges of first-degree attempted murder.
“It’s the complete randomness of this. It’s terrifying,” Judge Mary C. Marubio said Tuesday in the hearing, which was live-streamed on YouTube, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
In Illinois, which has had more than 387,000 coronavirus cases and more than 9,800 deaths, a statewide mandate requires masks in public and while working.
The Chicago case is the latest incident of violent confrontations breaking out over mask rules. In September, an 80-year-old man in West Seneca, N.Y., died days after another man allegedly shoved him for asking him to wear a mask in a bar. A couple in Los Angeles was charged with murder in July after a confrontation with a maskless man turned deadly. A stabbing during a fight over masks at a grocery store in Eaton County, Mich., that same month resulted in two deaths.
The altercation in Chicago began at around 6 p.m. Sunday, prosecutors said, when Jessica and Jayla Hill arrived at Snipes shoe store.
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As the sisters argued with the 32-year-old guard, who has not been publicly identified, Jayla Hill took out her phone to record the confrontation, the Sun-Times reported, and said she was calling someone to “kick his a‐‐.” The 6-foot-5, 270-pound security guard then reached for the phone, prompting Jessica Hill to allegedly pick up a trash can and hurl it at the guard’s face.
The sisters punched the guard, prosecutors said, and then Jessica allegedly took out a “comb knife” that had a hidden blade and started stabbing him.
Jessica stabbed him in the back, neck and arms, said Karie James, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Police Department, while Jayla held on to the man’s hair. They then kicked him in the head and body, prosecutors allege, while the guard and the store’s manager begged the women to stop.
The sisters were arrested at about 6:15 p.m., according to police, and the security guard was transported to Mount Sinai Hospital. The guard was in critical condition, James told The Washington Post.
At the bond hearing on Tuesday, the sisters’ court-appointed attorney argued the first-degree attempted murder charges were too extreme because they were acting in self-defense and have bipolar disorder, according to the Chicago Tribune. The sisters have no criminal record.
The attorney also said the women had not planned to attack the guard. But the judge said she was concerned by the “sheer number” of stab wounds.
“This is just too random and quickly escalating,” Marubio said. “I can’t fashion conditions that would protect the community.”
The pair will return to court on Nov. 4, according to the Sun-Times.
