A nonprofit civil rights advocacy group called Wednesday for hate crime charges to be brought against a woman accused of attacking another woman, who caught her defacing a painting of a Palestinian man on a mural in the Pilsen neighborhood.
Natalie Figueroa said she was walking home from her workplace late Friday when she noticed a woman defacing the mural on 16th Street and Ashland Avenue. When Figueroa tried to interfere, the woman struck her in the head with a metal three-hole punch and pummeled her face. Onlookers called the police, who arrived at the scene but made no arrests.
Representatives at CAIR-Chicago, which advocates for civil rights for Muslims, urged Chicago police to charge the suspect with aggravated assault and a hate crime. Various speakers at the news conference lamented the desecration of a mural that they saw as a symbol of peace.
No arrests had been made in the alleged attack, police said Wednesday evening.
The mural, painted by Palestinian artist Taqi Spateen, depicts a Mexican man lying in a field with a Palestinian man, and is meant to represent solidarity between the Latino and Palestinian communities. The woman who vandalized the artwork burned off the section depicting the Palestinian man’s face.
“Here in Chicago, we are seeing a significant escalation of hate crimes rooted in anti-Islamic and anti-Arab sentiment,” said Heena Musabji, legal director at CAIR. “We are here to demand … that criminal actions based on hate are charged as actual hate crimes.”
A still-bruised Figueroa, who sported a sizable lump on her forehead, told reporters she approached the woman and yelled at her to stop defacing the mural. The woman, she said, swung around with a metal three-hole punch in her hand and hit Figueroa on her head.
As the women fought, Figueroa ended up on the ground, the other woman pinning her down and repeatedly pummeling her face. Figueroa said that her assailant taunted her during the attack, jeering that police would not arrest her.
So far, Figueroa has been unable to prove her wrong. CAIR’s news conference urged Chicago police to arrest the suspect, who, according to Figueroa, walked away from the scene after police had arrived and was not followed.
Four days after the attack, Figueroa still had two black eyes and a bruised left arm. Arriving at her job at the event space Hoste on Wednesday morning, she said, she was confronted with “Nazi symbols” spraypainted on the building. She believes them to be related to Friday’s incident.
Human rights attorney Farah Chalisa is working in partnership with the legal team at CAIR to represent Figueroa and another victim, who was attacked by the same woman at the same mural in May.
“What happened was not simply an act of vandalism — it was a hate-driven assault,” Chalisa said.
A hate crime charge is a Class 4 felony in Illinois.
Spateen’s mural was commissioned as part of the Mural Movement, founded in 2020 by Delilah Martinez. All 231 murals Martinez has organized nationwide are related to social justice and peace. Spateen is from Bethlehem, a Palestinian town, and is staying in Chicago as part of an art residency. His mural, one of dozens in Pilsen, is the only work that the suspect has defaced. According to Figueroa and the other victim, she has thrown trash at the mural and placed feces around it.
“This mural — if that’s not an artwork of love, I don’t know what love is,” said CAIR Executive Director Ahmed Rehab. “The defacing of that mural — if that’s not an act of hate, I don’t know what hate is.”
Ald. Byron Sigcho Lopez, 25th, explained that many people in Pilsen view the attacker as a threat. Last week, Lopez said, she showed up at a community meeting wearing a wig and sunglasses and prompted Lopez’s staff to call security.
