A Logan Square woman charged with throwing a Molotov cocktail onto her Venezuelan neighbors’ back porch told them “Leave on your own or we will make you” in a note at the time of the alleged March 2024 attack, records show.
Federal prosecutors accused Ana Hernandez, 69, of throwing an explosive onto her neighbors’ porch “to injure, intimidate and interfere” the alleged victims because of “their race, color and national origin” in a criminal information filed Monday in U.S. District Court. A Cook County grand jury indicted her on one count of aggravated arson and one count of hate crime in April.
The alleged victims’ landlord told Chicago police Hernandez had clashed with the first-floor tenants, who are from Venezuela, over the volume of their music on March 3, 2024, according to police records obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request. The next day, the complainant found his back porch “on fire from two Molotov cocktails.” The tenants put the fire out and cleaned up the porch and police did not identify any suspects, according to the report. The report stated that a security camera was installed on the porch shortly afterward, and Hernandez later denied being involved in the fire.
On March 17, the complainant told police that Hernandez had appeared on the security footage throwing a Molotov cocktail onto the porch, according to the police report. The neighbor also said Hernandez left a note on his car that read “Stupid Venezuelans go back to your country, we don’t want you in our neighborhood. Leave on your own or we will make you.”
Police arrested Hernandez on April 10, 2024. Cook County Judge William Fahy ordered her release pending trial on the condition that she not return to the block where the fire took place. Court records show that Judge Steven Watkins allowed Hernandez to return briefly to her apartment in December to move her things.
She is scheduled to be arraigned in federal court Jan. 15.
