The family of a 29-year-old man shot and killed on a CTA Red Line train says that he often talked about the need for increased security on trains in the months prior to his death.
Diunte Moon was riding on a CTA Red Line train early Saturday morning when his family says he fell asleep and missed his stop.
“He was tired, doing multiple shifts, trying to take care of his daughter and pay the bills,” Kina, Moon’s mother, said.
Chicago police say that Moon was near the 79th Street station when a man fired shots at him, striking him in the chest and abdomen.
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Moon was rushed to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
“Her (Moon’s daughter Alliyah) father got gunned down by young punks for no apparent reason,” his uncle James Moon said.
Moon was a law student and worked as a security guard to help make ends meet, and would often discuss the need for more security on trains.
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“He said there needs to be more security, undercover officers, under trains, and on platforms,” Kina Moon said. “When you’re paying your money sometimes people just snatch it and keep going. It’s just so dangerous.”
Chicago police and CTA officials have been promising action for months to help improve security in the transit system, but high-profile attacks continue to occur, including an attack Friday that saw a man shoved onto the tracks at the Damen Blue Line stop. The brazen attack in the Illinois Medical District was caught on camera, and the weekend’s attacks prompted Chicago police Supt. David Brown to repeat his promises of more law enforcement resources.
“We’re going to have to pivot more and more resources from admin to assignments like the CTA,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do and it’s not an easy task, but we’re dedicated to ensuring that people who ride the CTA are safe.”
According to an analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times, violent crimes on trains and buses have skyrocketed to levels not seen in at least a decade, with violent crime accounting for more than 26% of the crime on the system so far this year.
The analysis also found that the Chicago Police Department’s transit units are down to 145 officers, down nearly 100 officers from their peak staffing in April 2020.
Unarmed security officers have been deployed in numerous locations, and that will continue, according to officials. Meanwhile, community activist Tio Hardiman says that his group of “Violence Interrupters” will seek to deploy up to 60 non-profit staff to help stop violence in CTA trains from midnight to 8 a.m.
