Chicago Train Attacker Had 72 Prior Arrests

Fresh court revelations have ripped the scab off Chicago’s festering wound of criminal coddling. The 50-year-old predator accused of dousing a 26-year-old woman with gasoline and igniting her on a Blue Line train this week had racked up at least 72 prior arrests before this horrifying crime.

Lawrence Reed, a lifelong felon whose decades-long rampage should have landed him a life sentence eons ago, was finally ordered detained Friday by federal Judge Laura McNally—following the November 18 attack near Clark and Lake station.

But as his trial looms, the disclosure of his arrest marathon exposes the Democrat-run city’s bloodthirsty embrace of catch-and-release chaos. Lunatics like Reed aren’t reformed; they’re reloaded, courtesy of Soros-fueled judges and DAs who treat violence as a victimless hobby.

The Monday night atrocity, captured in gut-wrenching CTA surveillance shows Reed—stone-faced and deliberate—pouring accelerant over the unsuspecting commuter before sparking the flames and vanishing into the crowd.

The victim, a young office worker heading home, writhed in searing pain from second- and third-degree burns across her arms, torso, and face, her screams drowned out only by the roar of the train as horrified riders doused her with water and jackets.

Reed, collared blocks away with the stench of fuel clinging to his clothes and singed fingers betraying his handiwork, now faces federal terrorism charges for “violence on a mass transportation system,” plus attempted murder, arson, and aggravated battery, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office criminal complaint.

Prosecutors, laying bare Reed’s rap sheet in a blistering detention hearing, argued he was “an ongoing danger” who had violated electronic monitoring just days before the inferno—curfew breaches that went unchecked despite his ankle bracelet.

“At the time of the attack, Reed was on electronic monitoring after a Cook County judge declined to hold him in jail on an aggravated battery charge,” CBS News reported from the courtroom.

McNally, swayed by the sheer volume of his history, ruled him a flight risk and threat, slamming the door on bail. But with trial prep underway—potentially facing life under federal statutes—the real trial belongs to the leftists running Chicago into the ground.

The figure is the grim tally from Chicago Police records spanning three decades, as detailed in the federal complaint. Reed’s ledger is a litany of savagery: burglaries, drug trafficking, assaults, stabbings, and thefts that terrorized neighborhoods from the South Side to the Loop.

Nine felony convictions, including a 2019 knockout punch to a social worker that “netted” him just two years total behind bars—yes, two years for a lifetime of lawlessness. Most charges were plea-bargained into oblivion or tossed on technicalities, thanks to Cook County’s progressive playbook under DA Kim Foxx, where 85% of violent cases end in slaps rather than sentences.

This wasn’t Reed’s debut; it was his predictable encore. Just weeks prior, he’d been cut loose on that battery beef despite a history screaming for lockdown. “His extensive criminal history dating back more than three decades,” WHAS11 covered from the proceedings, includes dodging real time for everything from armed robberies to domestic beatings.

Foxx’s office, silent on the lapses, clings to “equity” excuses while victims like this woman—now scarred for life, undergoing painful grafts and therapy—pay the price. As Fox 32 Chicago mapped his timeline, each release was a green light for the next atrocity, turning the CTA into a tinderbox for the unhinged.

This train-tragedy isn’t a fluke; it’s the festering symptom of Democrat domains where “reform” means re-victimizing the innocent— a pattern of pyromaniacs and stabbers prowling platforms, sprung loose by soft-on-crime sorcery.

Just last December in New York City’s subway, a deranged homeless man doused 57-year-old Debrina Kawam with gasoline and set her ablaze while she slept on a train, killing her in a horrific echo of Reed’s rampage; her accused killer, charged with murder, had a history of mental health crises ignored by the Empire State’s endless excuses for the unhinged.

Closer to home, on Chicago’s Blue Line two weeks ago, a 27-year-old woman was stabbed in the chest while sitting innocently on a bench at the UIC-Halsted platform near the University of Illinois Chicago—an unprovoked lunge from a backpack-toting maniac.

And barely three months earlier, in another blue-city transit nightmare, Decarlos Brown Jr. fatally knifed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail, plunging a pocketknife into her neck in a random fury that left the 32-year-old mother bleeding out. Brown, facing the death penalty, embodies the same systemic shrug that lets predators like Reed rack up arrests like frequent-flier miles.

Echoing Stephen Miller’s October takedown of Gov. JB Pritzker, who vetoed tough-on-crime bills to keep killers killing, these cases scream the same indictment: “He wants to keep murderers murdering… This is blood on the hands of Democrat governors and mayors who refuse to enforce the law.”

Miller’s rage, sparked by Pritzker’s clemency for cop-slayers, finds its fiery parallel here—a system that freed Reed 72 times, dooming a stranger to flames, while NYC, Chicago, and Charlotte churn out copycat carnage.

Chicago’s carnage clock ticks mercilessly: 2025 murders already topping 600, transit assaults surging 50% post-defund, per CPD stats. Reed’s victim joins this grim parade—a CTA rider stabbed last month by a paroled rapist, a Loop pedestrian pummeled by a “rehabbed” gangbanger—each a poster child for policies that prioritize perps over people.