Facebook Detectives Are Trying To Figure Out Who's Throwing Eggs At People in Chicago
Getty Images
"I had an egg thrown at me in Lincoln Park July 20th while waiting for the Halsted bus," one Facebook post reads. "Luckily, the person had terrible aim and missed me by four feet." Another women said that she was hit in the collarbone — "and it HURT!" — in front of Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo earlier this summer. And another said that she had a bruise for several days after someone threw an egg at her in August. "Very weird stuff," she added. "Never been egged before."
Those are just a handful of the dozens of reports that have been shared with (and mapped by) the Chicago Egg Hunters, a thousand-person Facebook group that has come together to try to figure out who has been throwing eggs at random people throughout the city for the past several months.
According to the Columbia Chronicle, the initial eggings seemed to be scattered throughout the north side of Chicago, earning the perpetrator the nickname "The North Side Scrambler." When some of the earliest victims reported being attacked, their stories were met with disbelief, or they were told that it was probably because of something about them, personally, that made the egger target them.
"I try to look like a Bratz doll," hairdresser and egging victim Jody Driscoll told the outlet. "When I told my mom what happened, my mom said, '[It happened] because you dress the way you do.'"
Driscoll shared her experience on Reddit, and slowly, other reports started to appear on the r/Chicago subreddit. As the egg targets shared their stories with each other, both on Reddit and on the then-new Chicago Egg Hunters Facebook group, they realized that there always seemed to be a white box truck at the scene just before the eggs were thrown.
Moshe Tamssot, who set up the Chicago Egg Hunters group, reached out to the moderators of other neighborhood groups and started collecting stories of eggings and sightings of broken eggs that had happened in their areas. Some of those incidents went back more than two years.
Eventually, someone snapped a photo of the truck that allegedly appeared at every egging scene, and Tamssot and his volunteers discovered that the truck was associated with a furniture delivery store in the southwest part of the city. He contacted both the cops and the store's manager, but the reported egger has yet to face any criminal charges.
"I didn't want to get anyone in trouble," he told the Chicago Sun Times. "I was hoping they would be following along and giggling to themselves, saying 'OK we had a good run. We didn't really hurt people.'"
In early September, CBS Chicago reported that a man had been fired by that furniture company after his connection to the eggings was revealed. "The company was unaware that this driver was engaged in this unauthorized conduct," the store's owners said in a statement. "The driver was promptly terminated upon his wrongful actions being brought to the attention of the company. The company has no further comment at this time."
That doesn't seem to be the end to the story: the Chicago Egg Hunters believe that at least two people were involved, as the eggs were thrown from both the driver-side and the passenger-side windows. So either another serial egger is still at large, or someone has picked up where they left off.
"Watch out for copycats, folks," someone wrote on the Egg Hunters Facebook page last week. "A friend and I had two eggs thrown at us on Sunday evening while walking on Fullerton in Logan Square. It happened fast, but it seemed to come from a black car."
