A person of interest is in custody after a CTA janitor was stabbed to death at the Damen Green Line station on Thursday.
Chicago police confirmed they had a person of interest in custody Friday morning in the death of 41-year-old Julian Mobley, but did not release any further information. Sources said the suspect turned himself in at a police station in Englewood. There were two active warrants for his arrest at the time of the stabbing.
Meanwhile, violence prevention leaders are offering a $5,000 reward for any information that leads to an arrest.
Chicago police said just before 3 p.m., a man approached the 41-year-old janitor inside the mezzanine area of the station, got into a verbal fight that then turned physical, and stabbed the victim in the neck.
Police sources said the incident began when a passenger on a CTA Green Line train maced a CTA operator on the train. During the altercation, Mobley, a CTA maintenance worker, tried to intervene, and the person who attacked the train driver stabbed him.
Mobley was critically injured and was found unresponsive in a nearby room, police said. The attacker fled the station after the stabbing, headed west. Mobley was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The victim's 14-year-old daughter went on TikTok after the stabbing to share how she's feeling as she grapples with the fact that her dad won't be able to watch her or her younger brother grow up.
"There was so much I didn't get a chance to say to him," she said. "There were so many more years we could have had together, and my little brother could have had even more with him."
Sources who work for the CTA said they have been sounding the alarm about the suspect for a long time. He was forcibly removed from the transit system four times in the last month.
CBS News Chicago is not releasing his name because he has not yet been charged, but he has a lengthy criminal history, including a three-year sentence for stabbing another person in 2018. CBS News Chicago counted at least 29 crimes on the suspect's record dating back to when he was a teenager.
"I'm tired of things like this happening in Chicago. I'm so tired of it happening everywhere. You can't even come home from work anymore. You can't come home," Mobley's daughter said.
Pennie McCoach, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308, the union representing CTA rail workers, said Mobley had worked for the CTA since 2018.
McCoach called the stabbing a failure of CTA to provide a safe work environment for its staff and called for immediate changes in security measures.
In June, CTA rail switch worker Thomas Barlow was shot and killed during an attempted carjacking near the 95th Street stop on the Red Line.
"If nothing's done, the measurements of Local 308, we're going to look at other measurements that is going to cripple the city," she said.
Chicago police have issued an internal bulletin featuring surveillance images of Mobley's killer, but have not yet released those images publicly.
