A 26-year-old woman accused of attacking four strangers on a CTA Red Line train and near the State Street Macy's—striking two women on the train with a glass bottle and separately battering two other people—has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to three years in prison. Jada Beatty will serve 50% of that sentence, with credit for 310 days already served, according to court records.
Beatty pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated battery to a victim over 60 and one count of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon on the CTA, according to ABC7 Chicago. She had originally faced four felony counts of aggravated battery, including two counts involving a transit employee or passenger and two counts involving victims age 60 or older, per the Chicago Police Department.
What Happened on the Train and Near Macy's
Police said Beatty struck a 19-year-old woman and a second woman with a glass bottle while riding a CTA Red Line train in the 100 block of North State Street, according to a Chicago Police Department statement, which listed the second victim's age as 32. A separate account from CBS News put that victim's age at 31, and the dossier does not resolve which figure is accurate.
Police said Beatty also battered a 66-year-old man and a 63-year-old woman outside the train location. Other reporting placed the attacks on the older victims inside the State Street Macy's store, a detail that conflicts with the police account of the location, and neither version is resolved here. Beatty was arrested on December 16, 2025, at 11:05 a.m. in the 100 block of North Wabash Avenue, per the same police statement.
A Rough Year for CTA Safety
The attacks happened in December 2025, a year in which aggravated assaults and batteries on the CTA reached at least a 24-year high, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Recorded incidents climbed from 441 in 2024 to 469 in 2025, with more than half of all attacks happening on trains and buses themselves. The Loop, where Beatty's attacks took place, accounted for around 16% of those CTA-related crimes in 2025, up from about 5% back in 2009, per the same report.
Federal officials weighed in on the broader problem too: the Federal Transit Administration threatened to withhold $50 million in grant funding unless the CTA submitted an acceptable safety plan, the Sun-Times reported. Comparisons with other transit systems painted a stark picture — in 2024, the CTA logged 20.7 passenger assaults per 100 million passenger miles, compared with 4 to 9.5 at five peer systems, according to the Chicago Tribune. Worker assault rates showed a similar gap, with the CTA reporting 6.9 incidents per 100 million passenger miles against a range of 1.0 to 3.5 at comparable agencies. Axios, citing the Tribune's analysis, noted that CTA workers and riders are assaulted at roughly twice the rate of people on comparable systems.
Signs of Improvement After a Security Push
There has been some relief more recently. Reports of passenger assaults on the CTA began dropping in 2025, though complete comparable rates were not yet available, the Tribune reported. After a December law-enforcement boost, assaults against transit workers fell 25% in January and 29% in February compared with the prior six-month average, and CTA officials said systemwide crime dropped 9% through the end of February compared with the same period a year earlier.
Those gains sit against a backdrop of Chicago's broader crime trends. The city's homicide downtrend from 2018 to 2025 was generally steeper than peer cities like New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, according to NORC at the University of Chicago, even though Chicago's absolute level of violence remained higher than those cities. Beatty's case, with its random daytime violence against strangers including an elderly man and woman, underscores why transit safety has become such a flashpoint for Chicago officials and riders alike.
