CTA Riders Shoved onto L Tracks Once a Month, Data Shows

On the morning of Dec. 1, a 59-year-old River Forest man walked to the Harlem Avenue L stop to catch the Blue Line east toward Rush University Medical Center, where he volunteered on top of his regular job bagging groceries at a Jewel. Seven stops. A routine trip he’d made many times before.

He never made it.

A suspect with a long criminal history badgered the man for $1 on the platform. When he didn’t hand it over, the suspect shoved him off the edge. He fell eight to ten feet onto the tracks below, shattering part of his right leg and fracturing his left, landing close enough to the third rail, which carries 600 volts of electricity, that only luck separated injury from death.

“Had he touched that, it’d be a much different story,” one of the man’s two sisters told the Sun-Times, both of whom asked to remain unnamed to protect their brother’s privacy. “We’re very grateful that didn’t happen.”

A train was approaching. The operator spotted the man south of the platform and stopped about 100 feet short. Power was cut, as protocol requires. The victim, who is intellectually disabled and relies on the CTA to get around because he doesn’t drive, was described by his family as a “good, generous human being” living independently in the western suburbs.

He survived. Not everyone does, and the near-misses are stacking up.

A Sun-Times analysis of CTA records found more than 60 instances of riders being shoved onto train tracks since 2021. That works out to roughly one incident per month. The records show no deaths during that specific window, but injuries are documented throughout, and the close calls are numerous. In prior years, shove incidents on CTA platforms did turn fatal.

That’s the math that should be dominating conversations at City Hall and CTA headquarters. One person pushed onto the tracks every single month, on average, for five years running.

The Blue Line stop at Harlem Avenue sits at the western end of the line in Forest Park, a transfer point where the suburbs meet the city’s transit grid. For riders like the River Forest man who don’t have access to a car, CTA platforms aren’t a convenience. They are the only option. When those platforms aren’t safe, there is no alternative.

Chicago has debated CTA safety for years, and the conversation accelerates every time a high-profile incident breaks through to public attention. Security personnel, surveillance cameras, and police presence have all been cited as partial solutions. The CTA has faced consistent criticism over staffing, response times, and the degree to which riders with mental health crises end up in the system with no intervention.

What the new Sun-Times data makes clear is that shove incidents aren’t anomalies or statistical noise. They form a pattern steady enough to be predictable, which means they are also preventable.

The suspect in the Dec. 1 attack is described as having a lengthy prior record. How someone with that background accessed the platform that morning without any intervention raises questions the CTA and the city have not fully answered. Chicago’s approach to repeat offenders cycling through the criminal justice system and back onto transit infrastructure without interruption has produced these numbers. Sixty-plus incidents. One a month.

The victim from River Forest is still recovering. His sisters spoke to reporters because they wanted people to understand who gets hurt in these incidents. Not abstractions. Not statistics. A middle-aged man who volunteered at a hospital and took the train because that was his life.

Chicago built its elevated rail system more than a century ago to move people across the city quickly and efficiently. It became the backbone of working-class Chicago, connecting neighborhoods that cars and expressways later tried to bypass. That legacy means something. Riders who depend on the L today, the same riders who have no other option, deserve a platform that doesn’t put their lives at risk every time someone has a bad morning.

Sixty incidents in five years is not a crisis that appeared suddenly. It’s one that accumulated month by month while the city found other things to argue about.