CHICAGO — Cook County judges denied requests by prosecutors to have two men accused of committing violent crimes detained as public safety threats this week.
In one case, 26-year-old Victor Visinaiz is charged with vehicular hijacking and robbery. Prosecutors said he carjacked a woman in the 3000 block of West Ogden on March 31 after they were involved in a traffic crash.
A Chicago police arrest report said he pushed the woman, took her keys, and drove away with her 2016 Hyundai Elantra. Officers arrested him on Tuesday.
Prosecutors asked Judge Barbara Dawkins to keep him in jail before trial, but she nixed that idea. She released Visinaiz on electronic monitoring instead.
The second man, Tevin Tucker, is accused of threatening a 57-year-old security guard with a metal baton while stealing a phone charger on Wednesday morning at the Jewel-Osco, 1224 South Wabash.
Tucker was caught on video as he raised the expandable baton overhead to threaten the guard, but other Jewel security officers took him to the ground and held him for police, a CPD arrest report said.
He’s charged with robbery.
Judge Maryam Ahmad rejected a prosecutor’s request to jail Tucker before trial as a public safety threat. She released him from custody and told him to observe a nighttime curfew.
Court records show he has faced 38 different criminal cases in Cook County since 2014, primarily misdemeanors.
In 2022, he received a five-year sentence for resisting police. That case involved allegations that he tried to disarm a peace officer, according to court records.
In 2017, Tucker was accused of trying to burglarize an ATM near Wrigley Field and battering the cops who arrested him. He eventually received three years for the battery charge, but prosecutors dropped 11 other felony counts he faced.
He has been arrested three other times this year, receiving a four-day sentence for retail theft on September 26 and 30 days for disobeying a police order in October. The third case, also retail theft, was dropped by prosecutors on October 2.
