Introduction to the Incident
Mariana and her coworkers from Volaris were hungry. It had been a long flight to Midway Airport on the Mexican airline, and they hadn’t had breakfast. So, on Nov. 13, 2023, after checking in at their hotel, the young flight attendant and her friends decided to go out to eat and, after that, to do some shopping at Sephora.
The Attack
“I remember that there were many people because it was shopping season, Thanksgiving was approaching,” she later wrote in Spanish in a victim-impact statement. That was one of the last happy thoughts she had, Mariana made clear in that court statement. Around 2 p.m. that day, as she walked north in the 600 block of North Michigan Avenue in front of the Burberry store, a man with a decades-long record of arrests and a history of serious mental illness was walking toward her. Bruce Diamond, then 52, had spent part of the previous week at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and had just been discharged. He had picked up a long, white, birch log from an outdoor holiday display in front of the Starbucks at St. Clair and Erie streets near the hospital. As he neared Burberry, he raised the large limb and hurled it like a javelin. It hit Mariana in the side of her head. She dropped to the sidewalk, unconscious, blood pouring from her nose, an ear and her mouth.
Bruce Diamond.
The Perpetrator’s History
On Tuesday, Diamond pleaded guilty to aggravated battery with great bodily harm and was sentenced to five years in state prison, minus the 17½ months he’s already spent in jail. The assistant public defender who represented him told Cook County Circuit Judge Anjana Hansen that Diamond “has a long history of mental illness. He’d been hospitalized at Northwestern in the week before this incident. He had just been released from the hospital.” The Sun-Times followed Diamond’s case in court for about a year as part of an examination of how mentally ill people often fall through the cracks of Illinois’ treatment system.
Ongoing ‘nightmare’
In her written statement, Mariana said she has only a vague memory of paramedics bringing her to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. A Cook County prosecutor told the judge she suffered bruising, swelling and bleeding in her brain as well as a fractured skull. She had to relearn how to walk and eat. Mariana described painful weeks in intensive care while her family in Mexico appealed to government officials for an emergency visa for her sister so she could come visit.
The Impact on the Victim
The effects of the attack, she said, will be lifelong. In addition to ongoing physical rehabilitation, she’s had numerous hospital and doctor visits for damage to her vision and hearing. And she will need to take medication her entire life because she was left with three blood clots. The area of her brain where she was struck is now “dark” on scans, she wrote. She can’t work and doesn’t know whether she ever will be able to fly again. “I lost my partner, my safety, my confidence,” she wrote. “I am afraid to go outside. I can’t taste food anymore.”
Mental Illness and Crime
People with mental illnesses are far likelier to be victims than to commit crimes. But a small number of unprovoked, midday killings show big gaps in care for severely mentally ill, violent people.
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