A Good Samaritan is speaking out after he potentially saved the life of a woman who was being held captive inside of an abandoned home on Chicago’s Far South Side this weekend.
According to Chicago police, the 36-year-old woman was found inside an abandoned property in the 11900 block of South Eggleston on Saturday afternoon.
A passerby heard the woman screaming inside the home, and immediately called police.
“At about 5:45 in the evening I was walking down the street,” Antione Dobine said.
Dobine says that he heard someone banging on a window and screaming inside of a home near the intersection of 119th Street and Eggleston.
“I called the police immediately,” he said. “I waited for them to come, and when police got here they discovered there was a young lady in there, handcuffed and chained.”
Authorities say they freed the woman from an upstairs bedroom, and took her to an area hospital. Police are investigating the crime as a sexual assault and a kidnapping, and the scary situation has area residents calling on the city to help address the issue of abandoned housing.
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“We have to do something,” Louis Walton-Muhammad said. “When a person comes to this neighborhood it’s the first thing they see. Grass all the way up, properties that people aren’t taking care of, and in their minds they say ‘oh, this is a good place to stash somebody.’”
Dobine agrees, saying that the city needs to invest funds in the area both to address the abandoned houses themselves, and the crimes those structures could be used to conceal.
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“You have the money,” he said. “You have all of these entities you can use for us to build our community, and it’s all about us building that community.”
As for the heinous crime itself, police say the woman was released from an area hospital on Sunday morning, and the search continues for the person who kept her captive.
