A Cook County judge on Friday ordered a Portage Park man held while awaiting trial on hate crime charges for allegedly stabbing a white woman he encountered on a Northwest Side street with a Black man.
Prosecutors said Andres Stathoulopoulos, 20, approached the pair as they were headed into the man’s home in Portage Park about 11 p.m. July 8 and began screaming threats and racial slurs at them.
The man walked away to try to defuse the situation, prosecutors said, while the woman yelled at Stathoulopoulos to leave them alone. The man, who allegedly saw Stathoulopoulos holding a small knife, began to pull the woman away, but the woman suffered a deep cut on the top of her left wrist that needed four stitches.
Stathoulopoulos faces two hate crime counts and one count of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors didn’t specify a relationship between the two alleged victims but said Stathoulopoulos had called the woman a “(expletive) lover.”
Stathoulopoulos showed up on surveillance camera footage crossing the street toward the woman, they said, and was also captured walking away from the site of the alleged stabbing with a knife in his hand.
Schiller Park police arrested Stathoulopoulos Wednesday in the west suburb, court records show.
Judge Antara Nath Rivera on Friday ordered Stathoulopoulos held at his first appearance in the Leighton Criminal Court Building on the grounds that he had allegedly been motivated to act out of “racial hatred” and had a recent history of arrests and convictions. A search of Cook County court records didn’t immediately return results for the criminal record Rivera referenced.
He is next set to appear before a judge Wednesday in Skokie.
