From a reader email:
RE: laundry rooms. Do I recall correctly that the Belmont rapist a couple weeks back was seen in the building laundry room before he attacked?
These break-ins have me wondering if he was there to do a laundry room theft then saw an opportunity to attack the victim? Just a hunch since it seems unlikely that he would decide to camp out in a random laundry room on the possibility that a potential rape victim would wander into his trap inside of a random building at 4AM. Just my 2 cents.
Makes sense to us. Yes, the police report says the man was inside the building’s laundry room before the sexual assault, according to the Chicago Tribune report.
A reader emails that the culprits appear to have branched out to include building mailboxes:
I live in an apartment building at 8XX. W Waveland. A few weeks ago our laundry rooms was broken into and the coin mechanisms torn out (similar to your post yesterday).
Yesterday another break-in occurred and this time multiple mailboxes were pried open. I called CPD to report the incident but they could not a file a report because my mailbox was not one of the affected mailboxes. Seems these types of break-ins are becoming more and more common.
And a quickie from our comments section:
I don’t know if it was mentioned on this blog, or even reported to CPD (management apparently only heard about it themselves days later), but you can add the 700 block of Aldine to the list of where the laundry room bandits have hit.
These guys have to be getting in somehow, probably by following a resident in. Manners are great, but they can be expensive and dangerous if the person you hold the door for has ill intentions.
