A Lake County judge sentenced a man from Honduras to a maximum 16 years Friday for stabbing a 13-year-old girl in the hand as she was watching her brother’s Little League game near Lowell.
Dimas Yanes, 27, pleaded guilty in August to aggravated battery, a Level 3 felony.
The hearing took place under the shadow of the Trump administration’s ramped-up immigration enforcement and tactics, putting increasing pressure on the legal system, which gives due process to criminal defendants regardless of their citizenship status.
The U.S. Constitution is “still written, it hasn’t been changed,” Judge Gina Jones said during the hearing. Yanes was there for committing a local violent crime, not for his immigration status.
“That is what I am focused on,” she said.
She later noted Yanes was diagnosed with two mental health disorders at the Lake County Jail.
He is expected to be deported. A Lake County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman said she was checking for answers at press time on when he might be taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Police responded around 3:45 p.m. on Aug. 31, 2024, to the 17000 block of Morse Street near Lowell.
The girl said she was in the bleachers at the Lowell VFW softball field watching the game behind home plate when a man — later identified as Yanes — “hovered,” then tried to stab her in the chest with a big knife.
She blocked him and was later taken to the hospital for cuts on her fingers. The man ran toward her mom, who dodged him. He sprinted away from the field.
The girl was “viciously stabbed” by a man who had “no legal right to be in this country,” Emily Lopez, the victim’s mother, said in court, who was emotional throughout the hearing.
The child had to sit out the rest of her eighth-grade volleyball and basketball season, Lopez said. The girl also lived with nightmares and panic attacks.
“It’s not something a simple apology can fix,” Lopez said.
The girl, who was in court with her brother, wrote in a victim impact letter that four fingers were injured, two seriously. At one point, she considered quitting sports due to her injuries.
The girl said previously she has lasting nerve damage in at least one finger.
“I want to feel safe again. I want to feel normal,” she wrote. “I don’t know if that will happen.”
Deputy Prosecutor Maureen Koonce asked for a maximum 16-year sentence. She acknowledged they may not have been able to prove the original attempted murder charge at trial.
However, if the girl hadn’t blocked Yanes, she would have been stabbed in the chest.
Yanes was arrested around 4:30 p.m. Sept. 1, 2024 in a cornfield near Indiana 231 and Iowa Street after a daylong manhunt. Police said Yanes was trying to cut his hair in order to change his appearance just prior to the arrest.
Koonce noted he was deported twice since 2015.
Yanes had a pending battery case in Georgia against a minor. There were all kinds of kids and parents at the Lowell baseball game that witnessed the attack, she said.
He said in presentencing paperwork that he intended to attack a woman on her cell phone who was giving him a “bad look” and at one point told the court interviewer that he was “not doing time for this,” Koonce said.
He was a “danger to the community,” she argued.
Defense lawyer Eric Morris acknowledged the case received widespread attention in the community and local media.
“This case has become a symbol,” he said. “We sentence a person, not a headline.”
The legal system shouldn’t “bend to politics or pressure,” he said. “Especially when a case is unpopular.”
Yanes’ life was shaped by “poverty” and “fear,” the lawyer said. His client came to the U.S. for “safety” and “opportunity,” but never found any real stability and ended up wandering around the country.
At a young age in Honduras, he was “working in the fields” and had “little chance of survival” if he didn’t leave.
At the time he encountered the baseball game, he was “hearing voices.” Morris asked for 10 or 12 years in prison.
“Equal justice is not a favor to him,” the lawyer said. “It is a protection for all of us. It’s about the kind of justice system we want for ourselves. In the hardest, most unpopular cases, the law holds steady.”
“You had every right to be safe,” Morris told the victim, adding Yanes was remorseful.
Koonce retorted that the case was not “political” as Yanes could have killed the girl.
Yanes apologized to the victim through an interpreter, telling the court he was “lost” and “not thinking with clarity” when it happened.
Jones said she was looking at Yanes’ past criminal history, including several police contacts.
“I am so sorry you had to go through what you went through,” she told Lopez. “Please give my best to your daughter.”
In a previous news release, Lake County Sheriff Oscar Martinez Jr. said Yanes was deported to Honduras in 2018 but re-entered the United States illegally at some point. He has a pending deportation case in federal court.
Yanes told police he entered the U.S. in 2022 through Texas. He went to Colorado before coming to Chicago. Yanes said the stabbing was not intentional. He claimed he got the knife in the woods.
“Someone was following him and telling him to do it,” the affidavit states.
He fled when people started chasing him and threw the knife near a house near the edge of the woods. Police said they recovered a butcher-style knife believed to have been used by Yanes.
Court records also allude to an arrest for criminal trespassing in New York.
