THE LOOP — A Chicago activist was robbed at gunpoint the same day she appeared on television in a report on Chicago's gun violence.
Aleta Clark, an anti-violence and anti-poverty activist, appeared on ABC7's "Windy City Live" on Monday afternoon to talk about her work. Clark sells T-shirts with the slogan "Hugs No Slugs," hand-delivering them to customers throughout the city from sun up to sundown. She uses money raised through the campaign to help victims of violence and poverty.
But Clark, who raises two children on her own, was robbed of $540 while trying to deliver shirts on Monday.
"I have a lot of love and respect for the city of Chicago, but at the same time there's people out here who don't love ...," Clark said. "I'm OK, so that's really the only thing that matters to me."
Around 6 p.m., a few hours after the TV segment, Clark drove to Chatham to deliver a shirt. Someone flagged down Clark while she was outside and asked her for two shirts, then told her to drive to the next block because he lived there.
Clark drove to 87th and Cottage Grove and waited for the man. She normally wouldn't wait, she said, and didn't like how the situation felt.
But then a black Impala pulled up nearby and the man came up to Clark. She got out of her car and went to her trunk to get him a shirt. Did he want her newer style of shirt, she asked, or the older style?
"I want everything you got," he replied, pushing a gun into her back.
Clark asked the man if he was going to kill her over the money she makes selling shirts. He said no, he didn't want to kill her, but he wanted her money. He laughed about her own T-shirt, which urged people to "put the guns down," she wrote on Instagram.
Clark said she didn't have money with her because it was in the front of the car. The man pressed his body against hers and walked her to the front of the car, where he made Clark hand over the $540 she'd earned.
Then the man ran away, hopped into the Impala and drove off.
Clark couldn't move or believe what had happened, she said.
"I was in the middle of being grateful. I was in the middle of being sad," said Clark, a single mother of two. "What would have happened if I hadn't of had anything to give him?"
Clark posted about the incident on Instagram — she thinks the man must follow her there since he knew where she was delivering shirts — but didn't think police could help because she didn't know the man, there were no cameras and she didn't see any witnesses.
She notified police — and even got a check-in call from Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson, who knows her from her community activism.
It was not the first time Clark's been robbed, she said. Several years ago, a man tried to take her phone on the CTA. She struggled with her gun-toting attacker that time, trying to wrestle her phone back from him, but he got away with it.
She doesn't ride the CTA anymore because of that incident, she said.
The difference between then and now is that Clark is now an activist who tries to stop gun violence, and she's more used to working with people who have been victimized.
Clark is physically OK, though losing the money hurt her family, she said.
"That just let me know that there's so much work that needs to be done in the city of Chicago and all over the world," Clark said.
