At 9:24 p.m. on November 17, 2025, Lawrence Reed should have been locked inside his apartment on Chicago’s West Side, watching television or sleeping off whatever demons drive a man to carry a lit Molotov cocktail onto public transit.

That was the deal. That was the court order. That was the whole point of the black plastic ankle monitor strapped to his leg.

Instead, Reed was on the CTA Blue Line, calmly pouring gasoline over 26-year-old Bethany MaGee’s head and touching a flame to her hoodie while the train rocked between stations. Nine seconds later she was a human torch, screaming her way onto the platform at Lake & Clark, sixty percent of her body already cooking.

The ankle monitor knew he was out past curfew. It knew at 6:03 p.m. It knew again at 7:12 p.m. It knew at 8:49 p.m. It knew at 9:24 p.m. when the flames roared up.

It beeped. It flashed. It sent alerts to a private monitoring center in another state. And nobody came.

That single, catastrophic failure is now the centerpiece of the federal domestic-terrorism case against Lawrence Reed, the 50-year-old career criminal with seventy-two prior arrests whose freedom on the night of November 17 has become the loudest indictment yet of America’s broken pretrial monitoring system.

When U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes read the charges in open court on November 20, he didn’t mince words:

“This defendant was ordered to be home by six o’clock in the evening. The monitor recorded violations for hours. Yet at 9:24 p.m. he was free to commit an act of pure terrorism on a crowded train car. The question before this court is not just what Mr. Reed did, but how on earth he was allowed to do it.”

Prosecutors laid out the timeline like a horror movie countdown:

6:03 p.m.: First curfew violation ping.
7:12 p.m.: Second ping.
8:49 p.m.: Third ping, now flagged as “high priority.”
9:15 p.m.: Reed boards the Blue Line at Clark/Lake, Molotov already lit.
9:24 p.m.: Bethany MaGee becomes a fireball.

Each alert was supposed to trigger an immediate response: a phone call, a welfare check, a warrant. Instead, the private company contracted by Cook County to monitor thousands of defendants simply logged the violations and moved on. No police dispatch. No urgency. Just another night in a system that treats violent recidivists like overdue library books.

Reed’s rap sheet reads like a greatest-hits of Chicago crime: assaults, robberies, domestic battery, weapons charges, seventy-two arrests across four decades. At the time of the attack he was out on bond for yet another felony, fitted with the ankle monitor because judges had finally, supposedly, run out of patience.

Yet the monitor might as well have been a bracelet from Claire’s.

Bethany’s father, Greg MaGee, stood outside the courthouse after Reed’s detention hearing and held up a printout of the violation log. His voice shook with rage that hasn’t cooled in a week.

“This piece of paper says my daughter should be planning her Thanksgiving menu right now. Instead she’s in a burn unit fighting for every breath because somebody decided a blinking light on a career criminal’s leg was ‘good enough.’”

The monitoring company, Sentinel Offender Services, issued a statement that only made things worse: “We followed all contractual protocols. Law enforcement is responsible for response.” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart fired back the same day: “We never received a single urgent alert. The system is only as strong as the humans behind it, and somebody fell asleep at the wheel.”

Federal prosecutors, furious at the optics, slapped Reed with the rare charge of domestic terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction (the gasoline-filled Molotov qualifies under federal statute). Maximum penalty: life without parole. They want the country to understand that when a man with seventy-two arrests turns a random young woman into a human torch because nobody enforced his curfew, the word “terrorism” isn’t hyperbole.

Reed’s public defender tried to argue for release on a tighter monitor. The gallery actually laughed, bitter, disbelieving laughter that echoed off the marble walls. Judge Fuentes denied bond in under thirty seconds: “Mr. Reed has demonstrated that electronic monitoring is meaningless to him. The public’s safety demands he never see daylight again.”

Outside, Bethany’s family launched a GoFundMe that has now topped $750,000. Her brothers posted a childhood photo of her grinning gap-toothed in a Batman costume with the caption: “This is who your broken system burned alive.”

Chicago is holding its breath. Riders eye every passenger with suspicion. Women carry fire extinguishers in their purses. The Blue Line feels haunted.

And in a burn unit on the South Side, a 26-year-old woman who just wanted to get home breathes through machines because an ankle monitor blinked red for three straight hours and nobody cared enough to act.

Lawrence Reed will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in federal prison. But the real crime, the one that allowed him to light the match in the first place, happened long before 9:24 p.m.

It happened every time that monitor beeped and the system shrugged.

It happened when seventy-two arrests weren’t enough to keep him off the streets.

It happened when “home by 6 p.m.” became just another rule nobody planned to enforce.

Until a young woman paid for it with her skin.