Authorities have accused a 48-year-old woman of stabbing a 7-year-old girl to death, unprovoked, on Saturday morning, as the girl walked down a South Side street with her big sister.
According to a Chicago Police department news release, Shavon Gayden faces a single count of first degree murder for the death of the girl, identified by the Cook County medical examiner’s office as Edi Mari Hernandez-Chacon.
According to a police report obtained by the Tribune, Gayden walked up behind Eddimar and her sister as they headed south on the 8600 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue around 11:30 a.m. Saturday and “unprovoked, produced a knife and began stabbing” the girl.
Chicago Fire Department paramedics transported the child to Comer Children’s hospital, where she was pronounced dead a short time later.
Gayden proceeded north on Cottage Grove where bystanders detained her while they waited for police to arrive, the report stated.
Gayden, of the Calumet Heights neighborhood, was arrested twice in 2016 and 2019 for domestic battery charges, court records show. Both cases were dropped a short time later.
In September 2023, she was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and battery to a transit employee for allegedly threatening to stab a CTA bus driver. Records show Gayden pleaded guilty to the charge in October 2024 and was sentenced to two years of probation. Shortly afterward, though, she was charged with a new battery case. She pleaded guilty to that charge in July 2025 and was sentenced to six months of probation, and court records list her as having completed that sentence in January 2026
Records from the 2023 case, in which Gayden admitted to threatening the bus driver, show that she skipped a court date in February 2025, leading Judge Natosha Toller to issue a warrant for her arrest. That warrant had apparently not been executed.
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Gayden was set to appear for a detention hearing at Leighton Criminal Courthouse Monday, per CPD’s news release.