Tragic Happenings

By Rachelle Bowden in News on Oct 1, 2006 10:25PM

Times must be hard out there for middle-aged women these days. Maybe increased property taxes from TIFs has got them down. Maybe they know they'll never look like Beyoncé again, if they ever did (which is a long shot). Chicagoist still has some time before we truly get into their minds, and judging from our female relatives, we can wait forever and a day. What makes us want to stop time even more is the fact that two older Chicago women committed suicide by train in two days.

Friday morning, 58-year-old pedestrian Lucille Pelikant was struck by a Metra train and killed. She walked onto the tracks between Jefferson Park and Gladstone Park on the Union Pacific Northwest line. Pelikant resided on the Northwest Side of the city. And on Thursday, in a case that might be more familiar, 48-year-old Robin Dorsett also died from multiple injuries due to being struck by a train, this time via the CTA. She's the woman who threw herself off the Wellington Brown Line platform at around 11:15 am. According to witnesses, she just dropped her bags and jumped. Dorsett lived in Uptown on Lawrence. Both deaths were ruled suicides by the Cook County ME's office.

We say the CTA suicide might be more familiar because frankly, we haven't heard anything about it since news stories trickled in Thursday afternoon. Nothing was mentioned on the Friday morning news that we saw, nor the huge CTA Charlie Foxtrot in general. We guess we're just blithe enough now to not even comment on major foulups involving mass transit, even if they do involve the taking of a woman's own life. We'd like to see some more details come out about the lives of these two troubled women, but we're not holding our breath.

Image via chicagoenne

Thanks, Shannon!