CHICAGO — Police continue to investigate the death of a woman who was found dead, lying next to her severed foot at the bottom of a luxury high-rise stairwell in the South Loop.
The building doorman summoned police to the 1200 block of South Prairie after a resident discovered the scene on the lower level around 7:25 p.m. last Sunday, October 27.
Investigators at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office conducted an autopsy the next day, but the results are still pending.
Officials have not released the 36-year-old woman’s name, but court records show she had been in a relationship with a man who lives in the building. Chicago police detectives spoke with him this week, but he was released without being charged. A resident of the building told CWBChicago that they would be “shocked” if the man played any role in the woman’s death.
Cook County court records show the woman filed and received an order of protection against the man in October 2023. The order was dismissed the following month and records show the woman has not filed another petition since then.
In an affidavit seeking the order, the woman claimed the man “contacts me approximately twenty times a day” and calls her “derogatory names like ‘liar,’ cheater,’ ‘whore,’ and a ‘piece of sh*t.'”
She also claimed that she filed a police report for domestic battery in September 2023 after, she said, the man came into a hotel room at the Ritz Carlton while she was sleeping and launched into verbal and physical abuse.
The woman said she filed a second police report because, she claimed, the man became physically and verbally abusive at the South Loop building in August 2023, “slamming my head against a cabinet, slapping me, punching me, putting my head on a headlock, and dragging me away from the door.”
In a third allegation, she claimed that the man struck her in the head with a pickle jar at her Michigan home in July 2023. She alleged that she fled the residence after the man “poured vodka on my body, which burned my wounds.” He took the woman to a hospital for treatment of her “open head wound” two days later, the woman alleged.
Her affidavit said she took police to the man’s residence after the August incident: “The police officers attempted to arrest the [man] but he refused to open the door,” she wrote.
Records show that the Chicago Police Department has never arrested the man for any reason, and court records show that he has never been charged with any wrongdoing of any kind in Cook County.
