A convicted felon was described by a Cook County judge as a “busy little bee” Monday after prosecutors detailed how he allegedly ransacked seven Near North Side stores in over a two-hour period during the city’s second wave of widespread looting over the summer.
“It appears [Lee] Mitchell was a busy little bee. I was tired just listening to the work he put in,” Judge John Lyke Jr. said of the 28-year-old’s alleged criminal activities in the early morning hours of August 10.
“He put in a lot of work that night allegedly. Wow.”
Mitchell had just been released from the Illinois Department of Corrections less than two weeks before he looted the businesses in the Gold Coast and Ranch Triangle neighborhoods, prosecutors said.
Because of the damage Mitchell caused, other looters were able to gain access to the store where Mitchell was caught on surveillance cameras stealing a computer monitor, prosecutors said.
Mitchell also went to the first level of a Gold Coast condominium building at 9 W. Walton St., where he allegedly stole a pile of men’s suits and two small boxes of goods from two separate businesses, Indochino and OVO Chicago. At some point, he also swiped bins full of products from two Gold Coast Walgreens, prosecutors said.
At Luxury Eyesight, he swiped more than 30 pairs of glasses and helped break a security door at a Verizon store where he snatched several display phones and charging chords, prosecutors said.
Mitchell was arrested Sunday in Englewood after Chicago police identified him by his bicep tattoo spotted in some of the businesses’ surveillance videos, prosecutors said. He was allegedly wearing the same stone-washed denim jacket and jeans on all recovered footage… Chicago Sun*Times