Safe-T Act Winner

Imagine you're an ambitious kid. An over-achiever. You do eight years of grade school, graduate with good grades, honor roll accolades, and you go to a decent high school.

In high school, you continue on your upward trajectory. Advanced Placement courses, maybe a few summer classes for college credit, great grades, top-of-the-line ACT/SAT scores and honor roll again. Colleges are beating down the door and offering all sorts of scholarship money. College is a foregone conclusion. 

Four years at a top tier institution, more top scores, great grades, honor roll, Dean's lists, summer internships, the works. You realize you have a gift and you decide you want to take full advantage of what you've been given and contribute back to society. Medical school beckons.

Four more years of school - probably the most difficult of your formative years as yet, but you do it. The debt is probably mounting, but this isn't just a job you're shooting for - it's a calling and you want to make the most of it. After all, you're twenty-six now. It's at your fingertips. Just one more decision to make and given your past SIXTEEN years of schooling, you want a challenge.

You decide on Cardiology - one of the most challenging of fields and one that is undergoing constant evolution as science advances. Three years of medical residency followed by three years of fellowship, tortuous hours, stressful social life, a schedule of conferences to make sure you're up-to-date. If it all goes to plan, you're a brand new cardiologist at age thirty-two.

Now you have to land a good hospital where you may finally start to see the rewards of your TWENTY-TWO years of efforts. You apply all over - Cleveland clinic, Cedar-Sinai, Mayo Clinic....and you land a Top Ten Cardiology hospital in Chicago - Northwestern Memorial Hospital. It's a dream come true.

And then, you get into a parking garage elevator:

• Chicago police have arrested Sean Popps a dozen times this year, almost all of them for allegedly trespassing or damaging property on or near Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Streeterville campus. That string of cases follows seven arrests in 2024, again mostly on or near the hospital grounds. Records show he was also arrested at the facility twice in 2020, twice in 2021, once in 2022, and once in 2023.

  But the 39-year-old will not be returning to Northwestern for a little while. That’s because a judge ordered him jailed after prosecutors accused him of violently attacking a physician on an elevator at the hospital’s parking garage.

  The case marks yet another instance in which Cook County’s criminal justice system cycled a repeat offender back onto the street only to see the behavior violently escalate.

  Around 1:39 p.m. on November 2, a 42-year-old cardiologist entered a Northwestern elevator at 236 East Huron Street, according to court filings. Popps allegedly followed onto the lift and immediately began punching her in the head. He continued striking her, punching her again and again as she stumbled backward, covering her face with her hands, prosecutors said.

  A Chicago police report added that the woman sustained multiple bruises, abrasions, and hematomas to her face, head, arm, and hand. She had no prior contact with Popps, officials said, and the attack was entirely unprovoked.

TWELVE ARRESTS just this year. On top of the THIRTEEN arrests since 2020. On top of at least "thirty incidents" that one  security guard recalled, with another guard remembering incidents tallying "...approximately two times a day over the last 19 months.”

The SAFE-T Act in action.

Now imagine you're a forty-two year old Northwestern cardiologist who was just attacked in an elevator:

• concussion? wouldn't be surprised;
• broken bones in hand or arms shielding yourself? you're surgical skills have been diminished how badly? for how long?
• PTSD issues? that's going to come up at Medical Review Board hearings should anything go south, and in cardiology, a lot of things go south a lot of times.

Who is accountable if her skills (ten years experience after twenty-two years of schooling) are partly or completely destroyed? She's probably not fortunate enough to have inherited a string of hotels and trust funds to fall back on, although that is EXACTLY who is to blame for her current situation.