It’s prison time for a Skokie man who’s pleaded guilty to committing a series of creepy peeping Tom incidents in Lincoln Park.
Jonathan Chain, 41, who once did federal prison time for placing hundreds of phone calls in which he threatened to rape and injure three women in 2015, has pleaded guilty to two counts of criminals sexual abuse by force and residential burglary in connection with a series of crimes that targeted a Lincoln Park woman he didn’t know in the summer of 2019.
Judge Stanley Sacks sentenced him to three years for each sexual abuse count and four years for the burglary. Chain will receive 561 days credit for time spent in jail before he was sentenced this week. The sentences will be served concurrently.
Back in 2019, CWBChicago shared this video of a man creeping around the victim’s back porch and reaching through her bedroom window.
“He came back…for the fifth time,” the victim said. “He had a cig, opened both my window panes and screen somehow, took some pictures on his phone, took his d**k out, stuck his whole arm in my window, and pulled the blanket off the bed.”
After on incident, the woman managed to get on her bike and confront the pervert as he slithered into a van and drove away.
Police eventually identified Chain as the offender and took him into custody.
Federal case
Chain was on federal supervised release at the time of the Lincoln Park incidents.
He pleaded guilty in November 2016 to threatening three women during a series of interstate phone calls between July and December 2015, according to federal records. According to a grand jury true bill, one woman received 101 calls from Chain in which he threatened to “sexually assault, rape, and kill her and injure and kill her child.”
Another woman allegedly received 55 similar calls from Chain during the same period. And a third woman received at least nine calls in which Chain threatened to rape her, the grand jury found.
All of the calls took place between Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio, federal prosecutors said.
A federal judge sentenced Chain to three concurrent two-year terms after he pleaded guilty to three counts of making threats using interstate commerce. The judge also ordered him to serve three years of supervised release.
Chain wrote to the judge from prison in September 2017 and asked to be assigned to a halfway house in Chicago where he promised to “start again from scratch.”
The judge agreed and ordered additional conditions that federal probation officers in Chicago required before accepting him to their jurisdiction. Chain was ordered to participate in a sex offender treatment program, to comply with state and local laws pertaining to convicted sex offenders, and to not possess “any device that could be used for covert photography without the approval of [his] probation officer.”
Needless to say, that didn’t go as well as the judge hoped.
Illinois authorities have not yet determined when Chain will be eligible for parole, but his sentence will be reduced by 50% for good behavior and by the time he spent in Cook County jail awaiting trial.
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