The lunchtime shooting in the Loop Thursday unfolded so quickly that 80-year-old Vasken Bayenderian never realized a knife had even been placed against his throat.
A panhandler being chased by police grabbed Bayenderian for only a few seconds before Bayenderian fell. With shots ringing out around him as he hit the ground, he wondered whether he had been struck by a bullet.
“Am I shot?” Bayenderian recalled saying aloud.
The retired North Side resident escaped without serious injury, but the panhandler who had grabbed him was fatally shot by Chicago police. Jacob Paul Stolarz died of gunshot wounds. A Chicago police officer also was shot but not seriously wounded.
Stolarz, 45, was confronted by a police officer on patrol near Randolph Street and Wabash Avenue because of aggressive panhandling just before 1 p.m., a police source said Friday. He ventured too close to a business, the source said, and when the officer tried to stop him, he pulled a knife.
A call went out about a man brandishing a knife, and more officers responded. Stolarz refused several orders to drop the knife, police said, and officers tried pepper spray to subdue him. When that failed, they chased Stolarz onto State Street, where he grabbed Bayenderian and threatened him with the knife.
“I’m sorry they took his life, but he asked for it,” Bayenderian said Friday in an interview in his home. “A man who takes a … knife and starts running down the street is asking for trouble.”
Scott Horvath, Stolarz’s former brother-in-law, said he had not seen Stolarz since divorcing his sister nearly two decades ago, but he remembered Stolarz as a loner prone to temper tantrums.
“He was complaining about society, about living conditions,” Horvath said by telephone. “He would scream at the top of his lungs. …”
“He was huge. He was a tough guy,” said Horvath, a Vietnam War veteran. “He used to constantly work out with weights.”
A French and American dual citizen, Bayenderian had just renewed his French identification card at the French consulate downtown and was walking through the Loop when he heard someone yelling, “Get out of the way.” He ran but was slowed by a planter on State and was grabbed by Stolarz.
“I don’t know what happened in his mind that he did all these bad things,” said Bayenderian, who was collected but a bit tense Friday as he recalled his close call. “I never thought something like that could ever happen to me. When you’re downtown or anywhere, it can happen. I’ll be more worried now.”
Bayenderian came to the United States from the French town of St. Etienne at 25, the first in a planned family migration. But his parents and siblings never made it across the Atlantic, and he started a new life, settling in Chicago in 1954.
He worked odd jobs for years before finding a stable career as a draftsman with S&C Electric Co. in Chicago. He is married, with three children and three grandchildren.
Bayenderian said Thursday’s experience will be hard to forget, especially because the date on his French ID will be a constant reminder.
“Now my card expires the day that I was held up, so it’s something to put on the books, something to remember for sure,” Bayenderian said.
Tribune reporter Annie Sweeney contributed to this report.
