CHICAGO — When your job is to write about crime in Chicago, it takes a lot of effort for a story to stick with you for years to come. Something new and terrible always comes along to erase most of those old memories. But there are exceptions: a handful of stories that stay with you year after year.
Derrick Robie was responsible for one of the stories that won’t fade from my memory.
On Sunday evening, someone shot and killed Robie in the lobby of the Morse Red Line station. Considering his long history of robbing, assaulting, and generally just causing trouble on the city’s public transportation system, this seems like an appropriate exit.
So about that story that sticks with me.
Early on January 13, 2018, longtime North Side bartender Eric “Julian” Hall fell down the stairs at the Loyola Red Line station. No one saw him fall, police said, and he lay at the bottom of the stairs for a long time, dead or dying. At one point, Robie and a 60-year-old man approached Hall’s body. They didn’t call for help. They didn’t check to see if he was okay. They stole his wallet, which contained cash and credit cards, and stalked away.
A passerby later discovered Hall’s body. He suffered head trauma in the fall and was pronounced dead from his injuries.
Two days after stealing Hall’s wallet, Robie was arrested in Boystown because police recognized him as wanted for a Jan. 8 armed robbery at the Morse Red Line station. Robie was released on electronic monitoring and was wearing his monitoring bracelet when officers later arrived at his home to arrest him in the Hall case, police said.
After serving time for stealing Hall’s wallet, Robie was arrested for robbing an off-duty CPD sergeant outside the City Hall (19th) police precinct. Two months after getting out of jail for robbing the cop, he was arrested again for robbing a CTA passenger at the Morse station.
Robie asked a 32-year-old man on the platform for money, but the victim told him he didn’t have any and walked away, prosecutors said. Robie allegedly followed the man and told him not to run away because it looked like he had money.
He then claimed he had a gun. When the victim again said he had no money, Robie allegedly asked to see the gun.
The victim gave him $10.
“Look, that’s all you had to do,” Robie allegedly replied. “It didn’t have to get to this point.”
We’ve written so many stories about Robie that one of our readers was responsible for identifying him when CPD issued a community alert about yet another robbery on the Red Line this spring. Prosecutors said he robbed and robbed a 23-year-old man at the Granville station.
They found Robie in another car, allegedly with the victim’s $10.
A judge initially held Robie in jail because of a threat to public safety. But somehow, despite Robie’s long history of committing violent crimes at the CTA, Judge Carol Howard decided earlier this month to let him walk free without restrictions, court records show.
About two weeks later, on Sunday evening, Robie was back where he always was: on the Red Line. About 8:20 p.m., at least one gunman opened fire from a dark-colored Jeep outside the Morse station, spraying rifle bullets through the block, witnesses said.
Robie was shot in the lower back and collapsed in the station lobby. Storefront windows on the block were also shot, but no other injuries were reported.
Police who found Robie’s body said they recovered a gun from him. He still had his wallet too.
