A 57-year-old man with 32 felony convictions and a long history of stealing electric scooters is back on the streets after prosecutors charged him with stealing five more scooters, as part of a citywide crime pattern that left Chicago scooter owners frustrated all summer and sparked two Chicago police community alerts.
Incredibly, Randall Brown was freed from detention without even being placed on an ankle monitor, and Judge James Costello said in a court document that there was “no obj,” implying that there was no objection to his release.
CPD’s newly formed Area 5 Motor Vehicle Theft Team arrested Brown on Thursday afternoon, capping a weeks-long search for a guy who has stolen so many scooters that victims have started their own Facebook group to post images, compare surveillance video, and report sightings in real time.
Brown is charged with five scooter thefts, but he is accused of many more. Prosecutors charged him on Friday with stealing a Coleman Power scooter from a lady in the 200 block of North Aberdeen Street on August 5 and a Puma scooter from a man in the 4100 block of North Sheridan Road on June 23. He is also suspected of destroying a victim’s Stella scooter in the 2300 block of North Commonwealth Avenue on July 2, allegedly while attempting to take it. The locations of the other two alleged thefts were not disclosed in court records.
The latest accusations follow a summer in which Chicago scooter owners began exchanging information about a rash of thefts that appeared to span the city. Following the disappearance of their scooters, CWBChicago readers began emailing us, and some shared surveillance video of a man who resembled Brown.
In one video, taken at Orleans Street and Hubbard Street in River North, a man who appears to be Brown is seen working on a scooter in full sight as pedestrians and automobiles pass. He adjusts the ignition and unscrews the front panel before walking away with the scooter.
Victims told CWBChicago that the thief appears to employ mechanical talents to bypass the scooters’ steering columns and ignition systems. The scooters can then be pushed into alleys or other hidden spots, where someone with mechanical skills can start them up.
CPD issued a community notice in late August, identifying seven scooter thefts on the North Side. But CWBChicago readers have been reporting similar thefts for months, with incidences ranging from downtown to the Northwest Side and Lakeview.
Several victims expressed frustration with what they perceived as a lack of police follow-up. One man, whose scooter was taken in July, claims the investigator assigned to his case never returned his calls or collected available security footage. When he called his local police department, he was directed to detectives. The detectives then led him to the auto theft division. Three days later, he got a call.
“They told me, ‘Look, I’ll be honest.'” “If we find it, we’ll notify you, but no one is going to look for it,” the victim recounted.
“All I can do at this point is laugh,” he replied.
The victims subsequently formed a Facebook group to share photos, CCTV footage, and sightings of the suspected burglar.
Brown’s past record makes the latest charges especially noteworthy. He was convicted of stealing ten scooters in 2020 and sentenced to ten concurrent eight-year terms, but he was released in less than three years after earning credits while in prison, according to a source. Some of the credits were purportedly based on—are you ready? – his mechanical skills.
Police have made an arrest. The following day, however, Brown was back on the streets. Under the Pretrial Fairness Act, a component of the SAFE-T Act that eliminated cash bail, prosecutors can only seek detention for charges that fulfill specified statutory conditions, therefore prosecutors did not request that Costello be held in custody.
This doesn’t explain why he was released without electronic monitoring. Costello did not impose it, and his entry shows that there was “no objection” to the criteria he placed.
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office declined to describe how it handled the case or what choices prosecutors had under Illinois’ pretrial release law, saying, “We do not comment on pending cases.”
However, the administration has publicly discussed pretrial release decisions involving defendants facing considerably more serious charges than Brown’s. State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has personally criticized the decision to release Alphonso Talley on electronic monitoring before he was charged for shooting two Chicago police officers and killing one of them.
“We make sure that we put every bit of information in front of a judge to establish why we believe this person presents a danger, as we did in this case,” Burke said of Talley in April. “We established that he had four pending violent felonies, and despite that, he was placed on electronic monitoring.” Burke raised Talley again in August and condemned Lawrence Reed’s release, who had a pending case after being suspected of lighting a woman on fire aboard a Blue Line train in November.
CWBChicago attempted to purchase a transcript of Friday’s court session to discover more about what happened in the courtroom to persuade a judge to release a 32-time convicted felon with a known history of motor vehicle thefts without even an ankle monitor. We were told that a “daily copy” of the transcript, which is meant to be accessible within 24 hours at a premium price, would not be available until “three weeks at the earliest” because the county’s court reporters are swamped with casework.
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