IL: Chicago Transit Authority slayings, while unprecedented, are unsurprising to homeless, advocates: ‘You shouldn’t dread getting on the train’

Betty Bogg remembered how excited Margaret Miller and her husband were when they landed a place to stay at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Miller, 64, and her husband had been living out of their truck when they first sought help from Connections for the Homeless, where Bogg is the CEO. They were eventually sheltered through the organization’s hotel shelter program in 2020, where Bogg said she ran into them on a visit.

“They were on the sidewalk, and they called me over,” she said. “They were like, ‘We’re here, we’re here!’”

Bogg and her colleagues were devastated to learn last week that Miller was one of four people shot and killed as they slept on the train early Monday morning in one of the deadliest acts of violence on a CTA train in recent memory. Bogg said she had never heard of a client “executed” on public transit. But premature deaths among the homeless population that Connections serves are all too familiar.

“We regularly lose people to violence, to disease, to abuse, (to) all the things that can happen to a person in a particularly vulnerable situation like being unhoused,” she said.

Bogg and other advocates said the deaths of Miller, Simeon Bihesi, Adrian Collins and a fourth victim, an unidentified man, were a lurid reminder of the risks that homeless people face. While it is not confirmed that all four riders were homeless, people who regularly sleep on trains told the Chicago Tribune they hadn’t necessarily been surprised to hear of the deaths, although they tended to worry more about theft when they found themselves sleeping on transit.

Bogg remembered Miller as a “caretaker” who spoke both for herself and her husband, Nicholas Johnson. Johnson used a wheelchair and was a man of few words, she recalled, and Miller “really did the talking for them.”

”She would really tell us what they needed,” Bogg said. “She was solicitous and kind and a good person.”

Bogg last saw Miller at a 2022 memorial service where she spoke in honor of her husband, who had died earlier that year. She was housed by then, Bogg said, though the organization’s staff kept in touch with her.

Bogg had last heard Miller was living in Des Plaines. The organization’s most recent contact with her was in January.

“Things seemed OK,” Bogg said.

Bogg wasn’t sure how Miller ended up on the train Monday morning and only heard of her death when the Forest Park Police Department called asking about finding Miller’s next of kin. Connections staff was trying to help reach a living relative to make funeral arrangements.

Social service organizations typically do not identify people they work with, but will sometimes help contact relatives depending on their knowledge of a person’s wishes for their medical care.

The agency investigating a death is responsible for notifying next of kin about their relative’s death, a spokesperson from the Cook County medical examiner’s office said. If someone is not found within 10 days of a death, the medical examiner’s office also gets involved.

If remains are not claimed after a month at the medical examiner’s office, the office cremates the body per the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Ordinance. The county also holds memorial services periodically for the unclaimed deceased, who are buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. The most recent service, held in June, honored 160 dead.

There isn’t firm data on how many homeless people are victims of violent crime annually, but Bogg said Monday’s shooting was an example of a pattern of violence against people without a place to live.

“It’s made worse by the way people treat and view people who are unhoused — the disdain or the shame that people heap on someone who is unhoused,” Bogg said.

On Thursday night, a speaker pumped Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ into the Forest Park station parking lot as people chatted in line outside a set of mobile showers. Volunteers handed out clothes and other supplies from a set of folding tables.

Nearby, Sam Tornincasa rearranged his things in a backpack. Dinner — a can of grape seltzer, some pasta, a beef jerky stick and a clementine — sat on the concrete ledge next to him. Tornincasa, 33, has been trying to avoid the train of late.

“I took it basically all winter, and I got robbed so many times,” he said.

When he was staying on the train, he did his best not to sleep at night. He’d wait for daytime, which he hated.

“These guys are just trying to go to work,” he said. “They don’t want to deal with someone (like me) that’s laying down or sleeping or taking up seats.”

Katie Rafferty and Richard Smith waited for their showers with a few bags nearby. The couple typically prefers not to spend extended periods on the trains, but have sometimes felt they had no other choice.

“When it was cold out, we had nowhere else to go,” said Rafferty, 33. “We’d wake up, our phones were gone, our bags were gone, everything (was) gone.”

They were waiting for the Blue Line when they first heard about the shooting, they said.

“We were just hoping it wasn’t anyone we knew,” Rafferty said.

It turned out they hadn’t known any of the three victims who were identified. Smith, 41, said the only thing surprising to him about the slayings was that they hadn’t happened sooner. They hear more about overdoses than acts of aggression on the trains, he said, though Rafferty in particular said she had also had physical confrontations while on transit.

“When we heard about the four people being dead, I was like, ‘Oh, really, yeah,’” Rafferty said. “It’s so normal.”

As for why they didn’t seek shelter in a more traditional setting, Smith said, “the shelters are just bigger trains.”

“The same stuff goes on there,” he said. “You’ve got to be in fear of your things.”

Smith said he didn’t know what could be done to improve safety on the CTA. But, he said, “you shouldn’t dread getting on the train.”

“You shouldn’t feel uncomfortable when you’re just trying to get to work, or you’re trying to get your kids to school, or whatever it might be,” he added.

The CTA pays the Department of Family Support Services about $2 million each year on outreach to people staying on the Red and Blue lines, a spokesperson said. Workers from DFSS-funded outreach teams connected 88 people to housing and placed another 220 people in shelter over the period between January 2023 and July 2024.

After about 45 minutes, Rafferty got to take a long shower. She emerged in a fresh green T-shirt and joggers, running her fingers through her hair. On the platform, Smith worried for a moment about whether they’d missed the chance to board the waiting train before he brightened.

“They have to look out the window before they go,” he said. “They’ll open (the doors).”

Sure enough, a conductor walked up and opened the doors to one of the cars with a large key. A few commuters looked up as the pair boarded the train and took seats in the back of a car.

The doors closed and the train shot back toward Chicago. Rafferty was still combing her hair in the window reflection.

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