 [JohnKass] The young woman wasn’t thinking about what would happen to her as she walked through Chicago’s elite shopping district on the Magnificent Mile.
The world was beautiful. It was just after 2 p.m. on Monday. People were out, shopping, getting into the holiday season. She was walking, talking with a friend on a beautiful day. She is just 23-years-old, an airline flight attendant, and here’s what she wasn’t thinking about:
She wasn’t thinking about brain damage, or being in a coma at Northwestern Hospital. She wasn’t thinking of her family weeping through Thanksgiving.
I read about the savage crime at CWB Chicago, the indispensable crime web site. It was under the headline, "Charges filed, victim remains unresponsive following log attack on the Mag Mile"
I’ve put a link to the CWB Chicago story in the first sentence of this column. And I urge you to share it with your friends, especially now.
I’m a subscriber. Why? Crime is a major issue, when downtown real estate fails, the city will fail. And the metropolitan newspapers went woke years ago, around the time of the Black Lives Matter riots that destroyed downtown. The papers stopped caring about crime, even to the point of refusing to run police mug shots of suspects. They were afraid of being called racist. Like other important institutions, the papers neutered themselves. I know. I was there.
Downtown has never recovered. I took the lede image from the website with permission from CWB Chicago managing partner Tim Hecke, who wrote the riveting story about the attack.
That young woman had everything in front of her, right there in front of the Burberry Store, 633 N. Michigan Avenue. I loved that store. I worked for 40 years on Boul Mich, when that store was an island of civility, a store that still speaks to excellent, classic British good taste and tradition.
That’s when the violent savage, reportedly a career criminal by the name of Bruce Diamond, made his move.
Yes, a savage. She didn’t know him. He came at her unprovoked to ruin her life. He rushed at her impulsively, without thought, in a completely savage act. Please don’t play the politically correct snowflake with me. If we can’t name the thing, then how can we responsibly deal with it, like adults? I use the word only based on his behavior. It was incredibly savage.
His weapon was a thick log that he threw at her "like a javelin," as she chatted with her friend, police and witnesses said. She never saw him coming. He used that log, taken from a holiday display outside a local Starbucks. It was about 3 feet long and a witness said it was thick about, 8 to 10 inches in diameter.
He used it to smash her in the face. He threw it at her head from a short distance away. He just walked up and unleashed on her. She went down. Immediately. Police saw it happen.
There was blood running from her ears and her nose. As I write this, she is still in intensive care unresponsive, as the chattering idiots of local TV news are doing their happy-talk bit, excited about the Michigan Avenue "Festival of Lights" parade. When I was a boy it was called the Christmas parade. But that was deemed offensive to some. It got in the way of commerce. Now it is a holiday festival of lights, with minor celebrities and politicians waving to the crowd of shoppers.
She wasn’t one of them.
The happy-talk TV journos were too preoccupied with satisfying their bosses and advertisers to bother mentioning the 23-year-old flight attendant hit in the face with the log or worry about her family or her friends. 
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