The couple at the center of one assault and robbery from a roving mob of adolescents during the “Teen Takeover” of Chicago over the weekend spoke out about the harrowing incident, explaining it was a random attack as they were trying to pass through the crowd. Things turned ugly when Ashley Knutson, 20, told her boyfriend, Devontae Garrisson-Johnson, 22, that someone shoved her, and he voiced his objection, asking who did it. After that, “everything went crazy,” she explained. “They said they were going to kill us. They turned around and started fighting. I got pushed down to the ground and the whole group went to DJ and not to me,” she added.
While she did get hurt, it was her boyfriend who bore the brunt of the assault, which eventually poured into the street.
The problem with making rash judgments and assumptions based on a clip on the internet is that you're often wrong.
— Adam B. Coleman, President of Aintblackistan (@wrong_speak) April 18, 2023
The video of a "white woman being attacked" was actually of a black man being attacked next to his white girlfriend. (Credit: @DTheKingpin)pic.twitter.com/KRFWlB3rxs
Shockingly, Chicago police drove right by and did nothing to intervene—an account shared by both Knutson and the good Samaritan, Lenora Dennis, who rescued the couple.
“I literally went out in the street and held my hands up to a police car and asked them to stop and motioned them over to what was going on, and they just cut a path around me and just kept going,” said Dennis, who took the bloodied and bruised Garrisson-Johnson and Knutson to the police station to file a report.
She said she was “floored” by what one officer told her.
“I got told by the desk sergeant that this was going to happen and that this was going to keep happening because Brandon Johnson got elected [mayor],” she said.
This woman saved a couple from a violent Chicago mob on Saturday
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 19, 2023
A cop at the police station told her: “This is going to keep happening because Brandon Johnson got elected” pic.twitter.com/PjHulN9B9o
The couple was taken to the hospital but did not have phones, wallets, or shoes, all of which were stolen during the incident.
“God bless her. She gave us shoes, took us home, and took us to the hospital. Thank you so much. I don’t know where we would have been without her,” Knutson said.
Dennis explained her actions that day: “Do unto others. That’s a mantra that I live by every day. Just do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
In a statement responding to the mayhem, Johnson urged people not to “demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
— Brandon Johnson (@Brandon4Chicago) April 16, 2023