Family still grieves for grad student prosecutors say was killed by a man ‘terrorizing downtown’ Chicago

Anat Kimchi was studying the criminal justice system because she thought she could help make it fairer.

Kimchi, 31, a University of Maryland grad student, wanted to figure out which nonviolent offenders were the most likely to abide by the conditions of their early release from prison and which were likeliest to fail — and why.

Her work was ambitious and heavy on data analysis. So, in June 2021, she took a break and came to Chicago to visit a friend.

On a sunny, 90-degree Saturday afternoon during that visit, she was killed in a random attack near Wacker Drive and Van Buren Street about a block and a half south of the Willis Tower.

She had told the friend she was going to go for a walk and read a book.

Tony Robinson, the man accused of attacking her, lived in a tent on Lower Wacker Drive downtown and had a history of arrests and bizarre behavior, according to police reports and court records.

The police said Robinson, then 41, sneaked up from behind, grabbed Kimchi’s backpack and fatally stabbed her in the back and neck with a 7-inch Bowie knife.

She managed to hand her cell phone to someone to call 911 but didn’t survive the brazen, midday attack.

Later, someone who knew Robinson from the Lower Wacker Drive homeless encampment described him as being “known to do crazy things, acting weird.”

After his arrest, Robinson, who’s now 44 and awaiting trial, told detectives “he believes people are following him and tracking his location using their cellphones,” according to a police report. “He stated he sees people looking at their cell phones and has gone up behind them to look over their shoulder to see if they are tracking him.”

During a search of his tent, police officers recovered two knives and a sock filled with rocks, according to prosecutor James Murphy, who told a judge at an early court hearing that Robinson had been “terrorizing downtown.”

Robinson told police he carried the sock filled with rocks for protection, records show.

As with other high-profile daytime attacks downtown, the suspect’s increasingly bizarre behavior might have been addressed at several points but wasn’t, the Chicago Sun-Times found in examining how failures to treat mentally ill people with a history of violence allowed them to commit more violent attacks.

Robinson, who attended school through ninth grade and eventually got a high school equivalency diploma, has a history of arrests that started in his teens. Some of the charges appear to have been minor, including arrests for disorderly conduct and marijuana possession in Englewood in cases that ended up getting dismissed. From 2005 to 2011, though, he lived downstate in St. Clair County, near St. Louis, where he got prison time for burglary and gun possession cases.

By 2012, he was back in Englewood and once again getting in trouble for lesser offenses, including a phone harassment case in Lake County. He served six days in jail for that. The rest of the cases were dismissed.

Then, in 2018, Robinson was charged with battery, accused of throwing a metal stool at two employees of a Subway sandwich shop in downtown Chicago and damaging other restaurant property. That case was dismissed.

In the days before Anat Kimchi’s killing, Robinson was on a tear, according to police and prosecutors’ records.

In one instance, they say he struck a woman in the head in the 500 block of South Franklin Street.

Three days later, the records describe him hitting another woman in the head, breaking her nose and stealing her iPhone and cash near Congress Parkway and South Michigan Avenue. According to police reports, that woman, a tourist from St. Louis in town for a Cubs game, had left the Congress Hotel to get coffee when she heard Robinson say, “Are you following me?”

After Kimchi was killed, the judge at Robinson’s bail hearing spoke emotionally of the impact of such violence, saying: “These types of attacks in their randomness and violence cause a fear. They cause a fear amongst the individuals visiting our city. They cause a fear amongst the individuals who live within the city. The randomness of this is hard to explain, and it’s hard to adapt to. And frankly it is an act of terrorism on the community when it happens in this fashion.”

Robinson has appeared in court for dozens of hearings in the case over the past three and a half years. He was in the Cook County Jail’s hospital at one point and underwent evaluations by the courts’ forensic clinical services office to determine his fitness to stand trial, whether he was sane at the time of the killing and whether he could understand his Miranda rights. The examiner said yes on all three points, records show.

The Cook County public defender’s office, which is representing Robinson, declined to comment on his case.

The Kimchi family has been closely following all of his court appearances via Zoom.

Family members didn’t want to talk about the pending court case. But they say they do want people to know what the world lost when Anat Kimchi was killed.

They describe her as a gifted student who was drawn to psychology and criminal justice, who got two undergraduate degrees and a master’s from the University of Maryland in College Park. She stayed on at UMD to pursue her doctorate, which was posthumously awarded two weeks after her death.

She had a knack for obtaining and analyzing data and also for being able to clearly explain difficult concepts. Students in a statistics class she led were so grateful at the end of the term, they gave her flowers and a note of appreciation.

Her parents say they noticed her intellectual and artistic gifts early. Avi Kimchi says he remembers his daughter’s first words as a toddler, mentioning something that happened before she could talk.

“She said I took her to the post office,” the father says, marveling even now that little Anat was talking about something that had happened a month earlier.

A middle child with two brothers, Anat loved writing, dancing and making art. She had a soft spot for animals, especially her dog Shayna.

The family had emigrated from Israel when she was 8. She quickly fit in at her Jewish day school.

“She’s very vibrant,” her father says. “She made so many friends. She died at 31, which is 14 years after you graduate high school. Still, all her friends from high school gathered and made a book in her memory. So she really made a long-term impression on people.”

Her high school now recognizes outstanding alumni with the “Anat Kimchi Award for Excellence in Tikkun Olam,” Hebrew for “repairing the world.” One recipient is a judge in Pennsylvania. Another is a doctor in Washington.

The family also established an endowment at the University of Maryland to provide research awards to graduate students and another award to help students attend the yearly conference of the American Society of Criminology.

Her older brother Itamar Kimchi, a physics professor at Georgia Tech, remembers how his curious little sister would listen to him talk about science fiction. He says she became an independent thinker who took on difficult statistical analyses to explore problems in the criminal justice system.

“She really just identified it as something that was important and she wanted to do, to care for people,” he says. “And then, with her tenacity, she just went for really hard things. That was really, really inspiring.”

Her focus was an often-overlooked group of nonviolent offenders who wind up in prison after having their community supervision sentences revoked. She found significant differences in the severity of parole requirements among people of different races and ethnicities, which she detailed in her dissertation.

Her younger brother Ofer Kimchi remembers her for her intellect and also her wise advice about relationships and life.

“She’s a whole three-dimensional human being,” he says. “We try to tell stories, and we try to explain what she was like. And nothing we can say can come close to actually describing the entirety of her. She was, you know, complex.

“There’s all of these unknowns about who she was going to grow into. Possibilities. It’s difficult. We’ve been grappling with this for the past three and a half years. It’s difficult to convey the entirety of a person in a conversation or a series of conversations or even in our memories. I mean, everything gets flattened in this way.”

Chava Kimchi says her daughter would be out walking her dog and call her every morning, and they’d talk about the day ahead.

The mother says she still can feel her presence when she goes to a park near the family’s home where they installed a bench in her memory.

“We just visit it every, every day,” she says.