Woman who saved couple from Chicago’s ‘Teen Takeover’ slams Lori Lightfoot

A good Samaritan who saved a young couple that was brutally assaulted by an out-of-control mob during Chicago’s “Teen Takeover” has hit out at the city’s outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot, accusing her of trying to downplay the violence.

“I’m sorry, Lightfoot. I voted for you… but I can’t be involved in any level of sugarcoating what I saw,” Lenora Dennis told Fox News’ Garrett Tenney. “That was mayhem.”

Dennis was responding to Lightfoot’s comments arguing that what happened in downtown Chicago last weekend was not “mayhem.”

“The mass majority of the young people who came downtown, came downtown because there was great weather and it was an opportunity to enjoy the city,” the Democrat told a WGN9 reporter. “That’s absolutely, entirely appropriate.”

Lightfoot conceded that there were “a few” people who came with “different intentions,” but she insisted that it was wrong to describe the situation as “mayhem.”

But Dennis, who bravely stepped in to defend Ashley Knutson and Devanta Garrison-Johnson as they were being mercilessly pummeled by teens, disagreed with the mayor’s point of view, likening what she saw in the Loop neighborhood to a “war scene.”

“I felt like if I did not intervene, that young man would have gotten killed right there,” she said. “It was just something that I had to do because I couldn’t accept that.”

Knutson, 20, and Garrison-Johnson, 22, told Fox32 earlier this week that they were shopping on North Wabash Avenue on Saturday night when they were surrounded by a horde of youngsters.

“DJ had my hand trying to lead me through the crowd of people and they pushed him, they pushed me, and as soon as they pushed me I told DJ, ‘They just shoved me,’” Knutson recalled.

“And he was like, ‘Don’t shove her, who shoved her?’ And as soon as he said that, everything went crazy,” she said.

Knutson added: “They said they were going to kill us. They turned around and started fighting. I got pushed down to the ground and the whole group went to DJ and not to me.”

Knutson said while she was hurt in the fracas, her boyfriend suffered the more serious injuries between the two of them.

In a cellphone video that aired on CWB Chicago, Knutson is heard begging for help when Dennis comes to the couple’s aid and confronts the mob.

“I felt like at that moment, I needed to take action,” Dennis told NBC Chicago. “By the time [Garrison-Johnson] got up, he was bleeding from the mouth, his head, his eyes. He couldn’t make straight eye contact. It felt like he might have been concussed.”

Both Knutson and Dennis claimed that police officers who were at the scene did nothing to protect them.

“I literally went out in the street and held my hands up to a police car and asked them to stop and motioned them over to what was going on, and they just cut a path around me and just kept going,” Dennis said.

The good Samaritan took the couple to the police station and later gave them shoes and money after their valuables were stolen by the marauding teens.

Knutson thanked Dennis, saying she does not know what would have happened to her and her boyfriend without the woman’s help.

Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson released a statement in the wake of the unrest, urging the public not to “demonize” the rampaging teens who set cars ablaze, clashed with cops, and damaged property.

Dennis agreed that Chicago’s youth as a whole should not be condemned based on the actions of a few, but she called on community leaders, the police, and parents to act together in order to prevent something like that from happening again.