Philadelphia police have identified 22 year old Zymire Hughes as the suspect wanted for chasing and threatening at least a half dozen pedestrians near City Hall while wearing a Chucky style Halloween mask, and an active arrest warrant has been issued on charges including terroristic threats and simple assault. Hughes is believed to have fled Pennsylvania, with ties to California and Nevada, and the US Marshals Service is now helping track him down.
The spree happened in the early morning hours of Wednesday, August 12, near Dilworth Park at JFK Boulevard and 15th Street. Police say Hughes approached a 40 year old jogger with his arm held behind his back and asked if she was ready to die. She fell while fleeing in fear and suffered a serious hamstring and spinal injury that Philadelphia Police Captain Jason Smith said will require extensive medical treatment.
Was He Actually Filming Himself During the Spree?
Police say yes. Investigators believe Hughes was holding a cell phone and recording the encounters, and Captain Smith has said he believes the goal was social media content, whether for personal amusement or to post and potentially monetize. Detectives have since linked two TikTok accounts and an Instagram account to Hughes, and those accounts, not a mask slipping in front of a security camera, are reportedly what helped investigators connect the footage to a real identity.
In a separate encounter that morning, a woman named Jameka Wilson noticed a masked Hughes approaching a jogger wearing headphones near the La Colombe coffee shop and waved to warn her. Hughes then turned on Wilson herself. She screamed for help and kicked him in the chest, and he fled.
District Attorney Larry Krasner did not soften the message at Thursday’s press conference. “He’s a punk. I mean, that’s the bottom line. He’s a punk who scared a lot of people for no good reason, and we’re not going to tolerate it,” Krasner said, adding a direct line to Hughes himself: “You think it’s funny to scare people? Well, get ready to get scared by us because we got the handcuffs. We got the jail cell. We got the Philly jury that’s going to tell you it’s not funny at all.”
Whatever the footage was ultimately for, it appears to have done the opposite of what a stunt built for social media reach is supposed to do. It gave police a direct line back to the accounts investigators say belong to Hughes, and a warrant now follows him to whichever state he’s actually in.
