A Honduran man is now facing attempted murder charges after he allegedly stabbed a 13-year-old girl who was watching her brother’s baseball game Saturday in unincorporated Lowell.
Police launched a manhunt in southern Lake County before catching the 26-year-old man in a cornfield near Crown Point.
Police said it was a random attack.
Dimas Gabriel Yanes, 26, is also charged with aggravated assault, two counts of assault and one count of threatening.
He is being held at the Lake County Jail, held on a $150,000 or $15,000 cash bond. An address is not listed in court records.
Police responded around 3:45 p.m. on Aug. 31 to the 17000 block of Morse Street near Lowell.
The girl said she was in the stands at the Lowell VFW softball field watching the game behind home plate when a man — later identified as Yanes — “hovered” and then tried to stab her in the chest with a large knife.
She blocked him and was later taken to hospital for cuts on her fingers. The man ran towards her mother, who avoided him. He sprinted off the field.
The victim’s mother said she heard the girl scream, ran to her, and the man turned and tried to stab her.
A witness said the man came out of the woods and walked toward the field. He believed that the girl’s parasol that she was holding blocked most of the knife’s blows and saved her life.
Yanes was arrested around 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 1 in a cornfield near Indiana 231 and Iowa Street. Police said Yanes tried to cut his hair to change his appearance just before the arrest.
In a statement Sunday, Lake County Sheriff Oscar Martinez Jr. said. that the man was deported to Honduras in 2018 but traveled back to the United States illegally at some point. The US Department of Homeland Security has been notified that he is in custody.
He told police he entered the United States in 2022 through Texas. He went to Colorado before coming to Chicago.
Yanes said the stabbing was not intentional. He claimed he got the knife in the woods.
“Someone followed him and told him to do it,” the affidavit states.
He fled when people started chasing him and threw the knife near a house near the edge of the forest. Police said they found a butcher-style knife believed to have been used by Yanes.
Court records allude to arrests last year in Georgia for assault and criminal trespass in New York.