A Rogers Park woman who was beaten with a cooking pot and robbed inside her own apartment tracked down her alleged attacker after Facebook suggested she add him as a “friend.” The shrewd North Sider ran his social media photos through ChatGPT, figured out where he lived, and ultimately found him at a bus stop.
Prosecutors said the 23-year-old woman met the man and exchanged phone numbers outside Rino bar in River North at closing time on June 13. She later invited him to her apartment. They hung out for a while, but the woman became uncomfortable and asked the man to leave. He kept refusing, so she gave up and went to the kitchen to make some eggs, prosecutors said.
The man followed her, grabbed a cooking pot, and struck her repeatedly in the head, arms and legs, then fled with her phone and purse. Stunned, the woman grabbed a knife and chased after him, but he got away. She encountered police near the Morse Red Line station, and EMS took her to St. Francis Hospital, where she received 14 staples for a head wound, according to a CPD report.
The next day, the woman’s building manager gave her surveillance images of the man who had attacked her. Some of the images showed him carrying her blue purse.
After the woman returned from an extended, previously planned vacation, Facebook had a friend suggestion: Isaiah Del Torro. Oddly, prosecutors say, the profile photo looked like the man who had attacked her, and she wondered if the name he had given her, “Zee,” might be short for Isaiah.
After clicking on the profile, the woman recognized that it was full of older photos of the assailant, prosecutors said, adding that she subsequently found a more recent account belonging to him. The woman put photos of Del Torro into Google and ChatGPT and learned that he lived on the West Side near Madison Street. She went to the area, showed people photos of Del Torro, and started asking questions. Prosecutors said she learned that he used to buy marijuana in the area and that people thought he might live nearby.
She provided all of that information, along with the phone number “Zee” had given her, to Chicago police detectives.
On September 7, the woman spotted Del Torro, 24, standing at a bus stop in the 2400 block of West Madison Street and called 911. Patrol officers took him into custody. Judge Shauna Boliker ordered Del Torro detained on charges of robbery, aggravated battery causing great bodily harm and theft. The judge described his alleged behavior as “violent and erratic … aggressive and impulsive.”
Prosecutors said Del Torro had juvenile adjudications for robbery and identity theft in 2017.
