A Chicago activist is being praised as a hero after he discovered a woman who was chained by her ankles in an vacant house for several days.
Community activist Antoine Dobine told WGN he heard a woman crying for help when he walked past an abandoned house on South Eggleston Avenue in the city’s South Side neighborhood on Saturday.
Dobine, known as “D-Ice”, heard the woman’s desperate screams and banging on a wall.
“As I got closer, I’m hearing boom, boom, boom — ‘help!’ That’s what made me call the police,” he told WGN.
“I waited for them to come, and when police got here, they discovered there was a young lady in there, handcuffed and chained,” he told NBC Chicago.
“I just located a girl inside of this house. Police say she’s chained up,” D-Ice said on Facebook Live.
The rescued woman told police she was walking to a store when she ran into the suspect – an older man she knew from the neighborhood.
“I ended up bumping into him and he was like, ‘You know, come here for a minute,'” she told WGN News.
The man, who is in his 60s, grabbed the victim and dragged her to the vacant house and down into the basement.
“I’m trying to fight him but I can’t fight him,” she told the media outlet.
The unidentified man chained the woman by her ankles and raped her, the woman told police.
“He raped me twice. He left me in there handcuffed and chained,” she said, adding that she cried for help for several days until D-Ice answered her cries at 5:30 p.m. Saturday.
D-Ice said the vacant house was known as the “candy store” because an old woman who lived in the house sold penny candy to neighborhood children. He said the house has been abandoned for 30 years.
D-Ice told WGN he paid for a hotel room for the homeless victim and created a Spotfund account to raise money to build a home for the victim. He raised over $1,800 of a $250,000 goal.
The woman expressed her appreciation for D-Ice. “He could have ignored me but he heard me and he helped me. I’m just blessed, I’m truly blessed,” she told WGN. “I believe he [the kidnapper] will strike again. I just want him caught.”
