For about nine minutes, Tiara Lee-Roberts and her girlfriend had a volatile argument on the 69th Street Red Line platform, prosecutors alleged, until Lee-Roberts put a gun to the woman’s neck and shot her. Lee-Roberts, 28, is charged with murder after her 30-year-old girlfriend died from her woun ds at the South Side transit stop Tuesday evening. “You have the defendant carrying a loaded weapon on a CTA Red Line platform,” Assistant State’s Attorney Todd Kleist said, stressing the danger of the encounter during a detention hearing Friday at the Leighton Criminal Court Building. “It’s surrounded on both sides by the expressway.” Despite arguments from Lee-Roberts’ attorney that the victim was the aggressor, Judge Shauna Boliker ordered her to remain in jail while her case is pending. “This was a vicious, vicious response to a verbal altercation,” Boliker said. Earlier in the evening, the couple ate together with the victim’s family with no issues arising, Kleist said. Later, though, they returned to the victim’s apartment, then left for the train platform in the first block of West 69th Street. That’s where, prosecutors said, the two got into an explosive argument, parts of which were caught on surveillance camera. The victim, at various points, swung at Lee-Roberts and punched her in the back of the head, prosecutors said. But, Kleist argued, when Lee-Roberts took out a gun, the victim wasn’t holding anything and had her arms to her side. William Wolf, Lee-Roberts’ attorney, though, said his client accidentally shot the woman after she instigated a fight, repeatedly attacking Lee-Roberts. “They have completely overcharged this case in every way shape and form,” Wolf said of prosecutors. In making her decision, Boliker noted that Lee-Roberts was not supposed to have a gun on a CTA platform, where others in the vicinity could also have been harmed. “I don’t find any evidence here that this is fact is an accident,” she said. The shooting happened amid ongoing concern about criminal activity on CTA platforms, trains and buses. Though violent crime has dipped in recent years, a Tribune analysis last year showed that reported transit crime had remained above pre-pandemic levels, even as the CTA has boosted spending on security services in recent years. In September, four people were shot and killed while they were sleeping on a Blue Line train. The alleged shooter, Rhanni Davis, is facing murder charges. ...read more read less