Note of the editors: This story contains information that some readers may find disturbing.
The Chicago police have arrested a man who was accused of touching a 9-year-old girl in a South Loop Playground earlier this month. The suspect, the 69-year-old Lodell Burnett, has a decades long history of hunting minors, including a conviction from 2022 for the sexual abuse of a 4-year-old in a pre-city playground and the sexual abuse of a 6-year-old in 1992, the authorities said.
According to public prosecutors, the 9-year-old girl sat on a couch in Jones Park, located in the 1200 block of South Plymouth Court, then a man with gray face hair, missing teeth and a bald head of her around 7:30 PM on 11 June.
Later she told officials that the man asked how much she wanted for her basketball and her then about three seconds between her legs hit her shorts. The girl’s 6-year-old cousin, also in the park, reported that the same man grabbed her foot while she was in a play structure. After the attack, the man followed the girls briefly as they fled the park.
The 9-year-old ran home and told her mother, who immediately contacted the police.
On June 12, after specialists had interviewed the girls, CPD published a community warning with two photos of the suspect recorded by surveillance cameras in South Loop Elementary School, adjacent to Jones Park.
Patrol officers then saw Burnett near the Harold Washington library, with the same black T-shirt with a skeleton design that the perpetrator wore. They arrested him.
During an interview with detectives, Burnett reportedly admitted that she had touched the 9-year-old and claimed that her legs were open, so he touched her. He further stated that touching her ‘felt good and made him [feel aroused]’Said public prosecutors in a detention -spice.
Judge James Costello has granted the petition of the State to retain Burnett pending a process.
The criminal history of Burnett comprises a 27-year prison sentence in 1992 for worsened criminal sexual attack and illegal restraint after he had abducted a 6-year-old girl from the backyard of her family and had attacked her in a nearby garage.
In 2022 he was convicted of worsened criminal sexual abuse for pinching the buttocks of a 4-year-old girl in a Maywood playground and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Betnett was imprisoned five times between these convictions because he did not register as a sex offender and is currently not in accordance with registration requirements, according to prosecutors.
