Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Woman with Butcher Knife Wanted to Murder People: Cops

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Katelyn Harmon, 25, faces a long list of charges in Illinois after police said she went on a rampage at an outlet mall in Gurnee, Illinois. Harmon is from Wisconsin but traveled to Illinois where she is accused of trying to kill two people with her car and then attacking a third with a butcher knife. Harmon posted a number of videos and posts on social media including one where she waved the knife. Law&Crime's Angenette Levy breaks down the case in this episode of Crime Fix — a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: Download the SAN app at https://san.com/crimefix for Unbiased, Straight factsHost:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guest: Eric Faddis https://www.instagram.com/e_fad/?hl=enCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, they still haven't found me. I guess I outsmarted the cops. God always wins. Caitlin Harmon, a mother to a young child, bragging on Facebook after she's accused of trying to kill two people and injuring a third. I go through the disturbing case, social media posts, and where this case could be heading. I'm Ann Janette Levy, and this is crime fix. Staying on top of the news is absolutely crucial, but with media bias these days, who knows what to believe.

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chilling and allegedly unfolding in real time because the suspect in this case, 25-year-old Caitlin Harmon of Wisconsin is not only accused of a random, violent crime spree. She's also accused of documenting it. That's right, for the entire world to see on her Facebook page. Police say Harmon launched this random attack at Gurney Mills in Illinois, using her car as a weapon, striking two pedestrians. One of them, a 79-year-old man, was left in critical condition. And minutes later, she's accused of attacking a complete stranger with a large butcher knife in a nearby parking lot. Now, investigators are calling this purely random violence.

But what sets this case apart is what police say was happening in between. Prosecutors alleged that instead of running, Harmon turned to social media and posted this. Take a listen. I guess I outsmarted the cops. God always wins. Now that's Caitlin Harmon, allegedly recording herself, bragging about evading police, while holding the very knife, investigators say was used moments later. So let's back up and let me bring you into this world of chaos with me. Now this is all alleged as police have filed charges and the case is moving through the courts.

The stage is Gurney, Illinois. That's a town in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Monday, February 2nd is the date. It's just after 10 in the morning at the Gurney Mills outlet mall, a typical weekday. People are shopping. They're going to work, running errands, things like that. and then absolute chaos. At 10.05 a.m., according to the Gurney Police Department, a call comes in. A vehicle has struck a pedestrian in the parking lot of the Hobby Lobby store.

The scene investigators later describe is this, a car driving through a parking lot aisle, strikes a 79-year-old man standing beside his own vehicle. The force of the impact is violent. Prosecutors would later say in court, according to the Lake and McHenry County scanner, that there's surveillance video showing the man being hit so hard that he was knocked into the air.

But the car doesn't stop. Police say it then exits the aisle and strikes a second person, a 60-year-old woman. Now the aftermath is grim. The 79-year-old man is rushed to the hospital with critical life-threatening injuries, including a brain bleed. The 60-year-old woman sustains an ankle injury.

And the driver? Police say she fled the scene in her Toyota Camry before officers arrived. So now police have a hit and run with serious injuries. They put out an alert to all surrounding agencies. Be on the lookout for a damaged Toyota Camry. And this is where the story takes its first bizarre turn. Because police allege the driver, 25-year-old Caitlin Harman of Waukesha, Wisconsin, didn't go far at all. In fact, according to the Lake and McHenry County scanner, She only drove about 850 feet.

That's the length of two and a half football fields. She simply went from the Hobby Lobby parking lot to the parking lot behind a Panera bread and a mission barbecue restaurant in the same shopping strip. And she parked. Now according to the timeline laid out by police and prosecutors, something remarkable happens. Instead of continuing to flee,

she allegedly takes out her phone and begins posting to social media. At 10.31 a.m., she allegedly posts two photos of the cracked and damaged windshield of her Toyota Camry. The caption, as reported by authorities, reads, I ran through Gurney Mills Mall parking lot and ran over people in the name of the light, good intentions, praise Allah. Harry Krishna, thank you Jesus. Then at 1037 a.m. while still sitting in that parking lot, Harmon allegedly posts a video. In the 19-second clip, she has seen holding a large butcher knife. This is what she was capped.

saying, hey, they still haven't found me. I guess I outsmarted the caps. God always wins. Here's a, I'm outside this Panera bread right next to Gurney Mill. Someone should call the caps on me. I mean, I was a good person and now I'm homeless, so apparently good people don't win anymore. Whoops, still one. What happens next unfolds with alarming speed. At approximately 10.46 a.m., just nine minutes after posting that bragging video, police say the situation escalates. violently. A 30-year-old man, a complete stranger, parks his Hyundai Tucson SUV right next to Harmon's Toyota. Investigators say Harmon then gets out and approaches his vehicle. She allegedly uses that same butcher knife to strike his window and slashes his driver's side tire. The man exits his

vehicle and a physical struggle begins. During the fight, police say the man is cut several times on his hands, but critically, he is able to wrestle the knife away from her and pin her now. At that moment, a Gurney police officer who is already in the area searching for the hit-and-run suspect approaches the scene. Officers order them to separate. Police say Harmon then stands up and aggressively charges toward the officer. He deploys his taser. She is subdued and taken into custody. The man with the cut hands is treated and released.

Harmon is treated for taser-related injuries before being formally booked. Now the charges. On February 4th, the Lake County State's Attorney's Office formally charged Caitlin Harmon with nine felony counts. She was charged with two counts of attempted first-degree murder and two counts of leaving the scene of a personal injury crash. Those are tied to the alleged hit and run on the 79-year-old man and the 60-year-old woman. She was also charged with two counts of aggravated battery causing great bodily harm, one for the critically injured man and one for the man stabbed in the parking lot. And finally, three counts of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, one for each of the three alleged victims. But perhaps the most chilling moments surrounding these charges comes in court.

According to reporting from the Lake and McKinney County scanner during her detention hearing, prosecutors played a video of Harmon being interviewed by police after her arrest. In that recording, an officer is heard asking her, You said you came out here for premeditated murder? her alleged response, I was planning on murdering someone. Asked why, she says, I just went rogue. And when an officer mentions help for the homeless, she allegedly laughs and says, Oh, I'm not getting out of here.

I'm not getting out of here. I'll do it again. I need help. A judge citing those statements and the mountain of evidence ordered her held without bail. The alleged motive, investigators say they have found none. No connection to the victim. It appears, they say, to be purely random. That is the core of the case.

But to truly grasp the disturbing nature of these events, you have to hear more. You have to hear what she was posting, not just in those critical minutes, but in the days leading up to that Monday. The videos paint a picture, and we're going to go through them. To understand the mindset, or at least the public persona of Caitlin Harmon in the days and moments leading up to this, you have to hear the videos, and we have them. In the days before the attack, her Facebook page became a fire hose of bizarre, self-recorded clips, mostly of her singing, the caption on one post from January 26th read, singing going to a recording studio, who wants a hit? The videos themselves are a journey into something off. Let's play a few snippets. My boy's a winner.

He loves a game. My lips reflect off his cross-co chain. I'm staring at the moon. I saw a shooting star and thought of you. I sing a lullaby by the voice I knew. If you were here, I'd sing to. But then the tone shifts. The lyrics get darker.

Just days before the attack, she posts this. I'm sick inside. Seek inside. Three distinct words, I'm sick inside. Now fast forward to that Monday morning, February 2nd, after the alleged hit and run, after she's parked behind Panera. This is no longer a song. It's a direct, chilling narrative. She picks up the phone and records what may be the most damning piece of evidence in this case.

Here's another look at that clip that I showed you earlier. Hey, they still haven't found me. I guess I outsmarted the caps. God always wins. Here's a, I'm outside this Panera bread right next to Gurney Mill. Someone should call the caps on me. I mean, I was a good person and now I'm homeless. So apparently, good people don't win anymore. Whoops, still one.

Now let's be clear about what we just saw and heard. Allegedly in that video, she brags about evading the police. Number two, she's holding a large butcher knife. The same type of weapon police say was used in the attack that followed in number three, she dares someone to call the cops on her. According to the timeline, she posted this at 1037 a.m. at 1046 a.m. Just nine minutes later, police say she used that knife to attack a stranger parked next to her. It's a sequence that feels unfathomable, but the digital footprint, these videos allegedly

lay it out step by step, from singing about being a shooting star and feeling sick inside to brandishing a knife and bragging about outsmarting law enforcement. minutes before an alleged attack. Joining me to discuss this case is Eric Fattis. He is a criminal defense attorney, also a former prosecutor, based in Colorado, not affiliated with this case at all. Eric, I was shocked when I first started reading about this case. It's unbelievable to me.

We have Caitlin Harmon, a woman who appears to be a mother from her Facebook page, traveling from Wisconsin, crossing state lines into Illinois, going to a mall of sorts. to kill people. Your first thoughts when you read about this story is somebody who's been on both sides of the courtroom. Oh, gosh, and just a chilling set of circumstances, really. I mean, and so well documented. You don't always get that in a case like this. There are social media posts.

There's a video that there's photographs. There's witness statements. And, you know, this could have ended a lot worse than it did, although it was a harrowing experience for these folks, I'm sure. The lethality level of this could have been very high. Yeah, most certainly. And more people could have been injured, for goodness sakes. And thank God, nobody actually passed away or hasn't to date. So, you know, we have her, I mean, they've got her dead to rights. I mean, they, I think that the question in this case is not going to be, did she do it? I think this is going to be a mental health case.

Is that how you see it at this point, given what we're seeing on all of the videos of her that she posted on Facebook? That's my read on it. It's definitely not a who done it. It's not like, hey, who was driving this vehicle. That all seems pretty clearly established. What's going to be the real dispute, like you said, is that mental health piece? She allegedly made some statements like she was doing this for God and Allah and Hardy Krishna. and every spiritual being under the sun.

And then at other points, she says, I'm homeless, I need help, that kind of thing. And so all of that is going to be wrapped into this central issue, which I think will be mental health going forward. We have elderly victims here, too. And to me, that makes this even worse because you have a 79-year-old man. You've got a 60-year-old woman who's another one of the victims. These are not, while they're not like, they may be able. They're still older in age. These are not young people who maybe could have like sprinted away

readily unless they're marathon runners or something like that. Does that make the case worse? If you're a prosecutor, you know, does that aggravate the circumstance surrounding this case? Oh, sure. You know, as a prosecutor, you look at the nature of the alleged victims and what the defendant intended to cause. You know, here, the, at least two of the alleged, victims are a vulnerable community, right? That there are folks who, like you said, are not, you know, track runner, you know, college athletes or something who could have dashed out of the way. So, yeah, I think that that is an aggravating factor. When we're looking at it's a prosecutor, we're deciding, hey, how morally blameworthy is this person? How culpable are they? And certainly

that age and vulnerability of the alleged victims plays into that. Why do you think that, and I know it's really hard for us. us as people sitting here looking from the outside in and people who don't do things like this to get inside Caitlin Harmon's mind. But why do you think she's doing this and then posting all of this on Facebook? I mean, she's not making a getaway. She's basically incriminating herself on Facebook. She's saying she's doing it for God. I mean, is this to, it's a claim of responsibility. and she's explaining why she did it. Is she in her mind thinking, this is a good thing.

Like, I did this because I did it for God. I mean, is she that potentially warped in her mind? That is going to be not only factual question, but a legal question. Whether she pleads not guilty by reason of insanity in this case, because what you're touching on, and Jeanette, is whether she knew right from wrong. You know, I guess theoretically, if she truly believed, that she was doing something good for the world or for God or something like that, does that call into question her ability to discern right from wrong?

And if it does, that that only further strengthens a potential mental health defense down the road. If you're her attorney, what are you advising her to do? I mean, she's already confessed. She's made statements to law enforcement. You've got all of this on Facebook. what do you advise her to do? Well, the number one thing is to stop making any statements. You know, that would be over the phone while in custody to people in that facility,

what have you. Stop talking. She has already done herself a tremendous hole. There's allegedly a public confession out there, basically. So that's a problem. In addition, from the defense perspective, you are bringing in experts to psychoanalyze her. You're also looking at her past in terms of any sort of mental health or medical history that could have contributed to this. You're trying to learn the full picture as to why this could have happened and whether that gives rise to any defenses.

I'm assuming, too, as a defense attorney, you raise competency as an issue. Yeah, you certainly can. So, you know, competency and not guilty by resentment sanity are often two people. pieces of a legal case that appear together. You know, if that is going to be the defense, not guilty by reason of insanity, you've also got to look at competency, which is whether your client knows what's going on and whether they can materially assist in their defense of the case. And so that happens when you're meeting with client.

You're assessing their ability to understand their awareness of the charges if they really know what they're facing and that sort of thing. And if they don't, sometimes you have to raise competency with the court. which is kind of a whole different legal process. Right now, you know, she's in jail. They're not going to let her out. I mean, and it doesn't appear she has any employment or possibly any money to post-bail. She's just going to sit there pending trial.

Do you anticipate maybe at grand jury additional charges will be filed? I mean, right now she's facing things like attempted murder, things of that nature. But they could always add additional charges at Grand Jury. They certainly could. You know, the place that we're at in this case is really in the beginning. It's really close to the starting line. And throughout the investigation, as they learn more about what happened, they talk with more witnesses, they gather medical records from those witnesses.

You know, there can be charges like assaulting and at-risk elderly victim. They're sentence enhancers that can also be added. So this is kind of just the beginning. It could even get worse for Ms. Horan as this case goes on. Most certainly. But I anticipate some type of mental health issues being raised in this case, whether it's competency. And maybe they, maybe she is deemed competent. But then I'm still seeing mental health issues here.

And then she's got a daughter. a child. So possibly they're going to say maybe, I don't know this, but I'm just thinking ahead, does she have postpartum depression issues combined with the drug use? Because we see photographs of her, too, smoking marijuana on Facebook. It could be marijuana. There could be other drug use. You know, a lot of people will say, well, marijuana is not going to make you do something like that. But we don't know if she's combining marijuana with other, you know, drugs. and if she's mentally ill, who knows what all of that could be doing in her mind? Oh, certainly. And, you know, that's why defense is really their duty to investigate the underpinnings.

How did this egregious act come to be? Why in the world would someone travel across state lines to try and hit people with their car and stab a third person? There's a backstory there. There is a history there. I'm not saying it necessarily excuses her legally. But it's something. something defense has to look into in terms of mitigation, any sort of mental health history, any sort of medical history, any sort of pharmaceutical or substance misuse history. All of those things could have sort of coalesced into this horrible alleged event with which she is charged. Eric, let's look at this from the other side of the courtroom. As a prosecutor, I think you just have to go at this full throttle. You know, from a prosecutorial standpoint, community safety is number one. That is something you have to look out for. And if you have a person in your community who is allegedly using this killing machine,

a vehicle to mow down elderly people in a mall parking lot and then try to stab a third person, you got to take that extremely seriously. Because if you don't, it could be a problem for that person getting back into the community. it could be a message to others that, hey, this kind of thing is going to be allowable. And so you've got to not have that happen. You've got to take an aggressive approach, I believe, and you've got to try to find facts that show that Harmon knew what she was doing and planned this. And I'm sure the prosecutors are looking into that now. Obviously, you know, she's innocent until proven guilty, obviously, but we have all of this evidence on Facebook. She's bragging about it, appears, on Facebook. They still have to prove the case in every element of every charge. But it seems like the evidence is really stacked up against her. It's going to be, in my opinion, it looks like a mental health defense. And I will be shocked if there aren't more charges here. Just a really, really

awful, awful case. Any final thoughts? That's just that, you know, in our modern social media era, we have these kinds of events where people sort of get on there and they give a full confession and they show evidence that is going to be used at their trial against them. I mean, it's just sort of a new landscape when it comes to prosecuting cases, defending cases. This social media piece is going to be huge in this case and huge in so many other cases. Most definitely. I think it really will be such a big piece of cases.

and it already is, as you mentioned. Eric Fattis, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time and your expertise. Good to be with you. Again, Caitlin Harmon. She is being held without bail at the Lake County Jail in Illinois. And we'll keep an eye on this case and let you know what happens. That's it for this episode of Crime Fix.

I'm Ann Jeanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.