A Chicago firefighter critically injured in an apartment fire in Belmont Central last week has died.

Mashawn Plummer, who had been a firefighter for just a year, died at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Chicago Fire Department Larry Merritt said Tuesday afternoon.

“We ask that everyone keep the family in their prayers.” Merritt sad. “Its tough to lose a loved one under any circumstances, especially hard during the holiday season which should be a time of celebration.”

Plummer had just celebrated his one-year anniversary with the department when he was injured while battling a blaze at a two-story building just after 2 a.m. Dec. 16 in the 3100 block of North Marmora Avenue, officials said.

Eladio Gomez, 37, died in the fire and another man was taken to a hospital in critical condition, officials said. A woman was also seriously injured.

A procession for Plummer to the medical examiner’s officer was planned for later Tuesday, Merritt said.

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It has been a frustrating plunge for the Bears the past four seasons, and few players have been hit harder by it than defensive tackle Akiem Hicks.

“So sad, so sad… because I’d do anything for them,” he said as he considered how far they’ve fallen. “But that’s the way it goes.”

Think back to 2018, when Hicks was at the center of the Bears’ glorious run to the playoffs. He ran for a goal-line touchdown on the lone carry of his 10-year career and lined up in the backfield as a jolly decoy as part of “Santa’s Sleigh.”

He rolled into Bourbonnais the next summer wearing a Shaquille O’Neal Lakers jersey as he took questions about whether he could help lead Bears to the Super Bowl. Two weeks into that season, before everything crashed, Hicks never broke character as he hammed it up in a cowboy hat for NBC’s Mike Berman and roared, “Woooooo. Hot darn it, we got it done,” after a late escape against the Broncos.

So much fun. So long ago.

Hicks has endured various injuries, a mountain of losses and fruitless discussions with the team about a contract extension since then. He’s probably in his final weeks as a Bear, and it was prevalent in his mind Monday during the 17-9 loss to the Vikings.

“I don’t know what’s gonna happen,” he said. “I just know… if I do end up leaving, I’ll miss it here. I truly love my time [here].”

Hicks and the Bears were a perfect match when he signed in 2016. He re-launched his career and grew into a star, which gave general manager Ryan Pace a pillar for one of the best defenses in recent NFL history.

Along the way, Hicks became one of the most beloved Chicago athletes. His dominance and exuberance on the field, along with his vibrant personality, endeared him to Bears fans.

And Monday, after the first of his two sacks on Kirk Cousins, he pointed all around Soldier Field to make sure they knew the feeling was mutual.

“I was pointing to the people that cheer for me, the people that love me, the people that love how I play the game… letting them know I appreciate them,” Hicks said. “They’re always yelling my name. I wanted to show some love back.”

Hicks thought it could be his farewell, though the Bears still have a Jan. 2 home game against the Giants. While he’s expected to play it out, Hicks knows as well as anyone that nothing is guaranteed.

At 32, he has still been excellent when healthy — and even when he’s not fully healthy, still pretty good. But he missed 11 games (mostly with a dislocated elbow that he came back from early just to play against the Packers) in 2019 and was out another six this season.

But when he’s out there, as he showed Monday, he’s as feared as any defensive lineman in the NFL.

“He’s done that his entire time here in Chicago,” coach Matt Nagy said.

That’s exactly the kind of compliment that matters to Hicks. He thinks a lot about his legacy with the Bears and has been pursuing a place in their history.

There came a point in his post-game press conference when he was asked about it. That’s how clear it was that this is probably the end for him and the Bears. He wondered humbly whether he’d earned a spot among the greats.

“Whenever I talk to the guys that came before me, just for them to say that they appreciate my game is enough for me,” Hicks said. “That’s who you’re looking to impress. They played it, they lived it. Talking to those guys — Tommie Harris, Dan Hampton, Richard Dent… It’s exciting [that they] even watch me play.

“So I’m happy.”

Hopefully that happiness continues for Hicks by getting a chance to win elsewhere before he’s done.

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NBA commissioner Adam Silver told ESPN’s Malika Andrews that the league has no plans to suspend its season as COVID-19 surges through the league.

“No plans right now to pause the season,” Silver said in an interview on NBA Today on Tuesday afternoon. “We have of course looked at all the options, but frankly we are having trouble coming up with what the logic would be behind pausing right now.

“As we look through these cases literally ripping through the country, let alone the rest of the world, I think we’re finding ourselves where we sort of knew we were going to get to over the past several months, and that is this virus will not be eradicated, and we’re going to have to learn to live with it. I think that’s what we’re experiencing in the league right now.”

The NBA has had to postpone seven games over the past week — including five over the past three days — as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has swept through the league, just as it has throughout societies around the world.

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Silver said that the Omicron strain is “beyond dominant” within the league at the moment, something the NBA can track as it has the ability to sequence every positive test that it receives from its players, coaches and staff members around the league.

“We’re up around probably 90% of the positive cases we’re seeing right now are Omicron,” Silver said.

Silver’s position on not stopping play is in keeping with the memo the league sent to teams Sunday evening announcing new rules regarding replacement players, as teams now have much more flexibility to add them immediately upon losing players to the league’s health and safety protocols — and, once they have at least two players in them, are required to begin signing them.

But one thing he said the league is not yet prepared to do is to openly change its stance on how long players have to sit out in the wake of a positive test. Currently, the NBA’s health and safety protocols say that a positive test requires either sitting out for 10 days or getting two negative PCR tests taken more than 24 hours apart.

Silver, however, told Andrews that the league has seen through the data it’s collected that players who have received booster shots have both shown either no symptoms or very mild ones, and have passed the virus through their systems faster — which could pave the way for the league to shorten the amount of time players have to miss at some point in the future.

“We always are measuring viral loads with our PCR test,” Silver said. “So that’s something, again, that it’s not just our doctors, but the medical community is looking at. I think they’re already realizing that you can move away from the 10-day protocol when you have players who are vaccinated and boosted.

“It seems the virus runs through their systems faster. They become not just asymptomatic but, more importantly, they’re not shedding the virus anymore. That’s the real concern in terms of others. And so we are actively looking at shortening the number of days players are out before they can return to the floor.”

And while Silver said the NBA isn’t ready to change its stance on testing when it comes to asymptomatic players — as, for example, the NFL did over the weekend — he did say that the league’s data makes it clear that boosters work, and that he is hopeful that the league’s current percentage of players who have been both vaccinated and boosted of 65% will only continue to increase.

“We have a lot of data we look at. In terms of players and coaches that have gone through the three-shot protocol, meaning the two mRNA shots and then the booster, and then past two weeks, only a very small number of those people have been breakthrough cases where they’ve turned positive,” Silver said. “And they essentially have been asymptomatic or very mild symptoms. We’re also dealing with a large group that either have one J&J shot or haven’t been boosted yet.

“I would just say to our community, really to everyone, at least based on the data the NBA has, that the boosters are highly effective, and we are strongly encouraging everyone to get them. In fact, in our league right now, we’re around 97% vaccinated but we’re up to about 65% of our players have been boosted and we’re in active discussions with the players association to get that number even higher. So we’re not, in terms of your question, in essence whether we can treat this as endemic, and people begin to move on and we only test those that are symptomatic and deal with those, we’re not quite there yet, but we’re paying a lot of attention to what other leagues are doing.”

But while Silver was quick to point out the efficacy of both the vaccine and getting booster shots, one thing he said hasn’t been discussed was another push to have a leaguewide vaccine mandate.

While San Francisco and New York have required players who play for teams in those markets to be vaccinated — a decision that will keep Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving from playing in any home games this season — no other cities have followed suit, and the NBA has not circled back on its proposal to have one with the National Basketball Players Association before the season began.

“No,” Silver said, when asked if he’d brought it back up again. “It’s something that we proposed. It’s something that the Players Association wouldn’t agree to. Having said that, we’re at roughly 97% of our players having been vaccinated. So from my standpoint, I’d rather focus on the 97% than the 3%. And, incidentally, many of the 3% now have gotten COVID, so they have developed antibodies.

“To me, the focus is on boosters for the 97% of players who have been vaccinated. As I said before, among those players who are eligible to get boosters because, as you know, there’s a waiting period after your second shot, but among those who are eligible to be boosted we are about 65%, and ideally I’d like to see that number get to 97% as well. That’s what we’re focused on right now with the PA.”

In the meantime, however, teams are dealing with having to rush to sign replacement players, in many cases, just to fill out their rosters to be able to play in games. Silver admitted that isn’t an ideal situation to be in, but that ultimately there isn’t much of an alternative for a league that is going to continue playing games in the middle of the pandemic still raging throughout society.

“I think there’s a recognition that these are the cards that we’ve been dealt,” Silver said. “Of course there’s an amount of unfairness that comes with playing in certain cases with some teams where particular players are out because of COVID protocols, but the other advantage is we do have an 82-game season and we do have a long playoffs, and my sense is things will work out by the end of the season.”

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A 2-year-old boy died in a house fire late Tuesday morning in West Pullman on the Far South Side.

His mother tried rescue to boy from the second-floor bedroom where a small fire started, but was unable to and escaped with burns to her body, according to Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford.

Firefighters arrived at the home in the 12200 block of Lafayette Avenue and pulled the child from the room around 11:30 a.m., Langford said.

Paramedics took him in cardiac arrest to Roseland Community Hospital. Despite resuscitation efforts from firefighters and hospital staff, the child was pronounced dead.

The mother was taken to the same hospital, where her condition stabilized, Langford said. Two other women in the home refused medical attention.

The fire was small and contained inside of the house, Langford said. The damage was mostly to the carpet and interior items.

Investigators were “paying attention” to a space heater inside the room where the fire started, but it was too early to determine the fire’s cause, he said.

There was no working smoke detector in the home, Langford said, adding that a working smoke detector could have alerted people downstairs.

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How bad is it? I watched the Bears game Monday. Part anyway. The end of the second quarter. Enough.

Why would I do that? Beats me. It was evening. End of another unexceptional day in Year Two of The Forever Plague. The old friend who was supposed to meet me for lunch downtown canceled at the last minute. Sick. That was disappointing. I was looking forward to going into the city, or what’s left of it. Maybe watching the game would connect me with the larger world, the community spirit of Chicago.

My announcing that I felt like watching the Bears must have alarmed my wife. She joined me, to monitor the situation.

“They get four attempts to move the ball 10 yards,” I explained, trying to bring her up to speed.

“I know that,” she replied.

Earlier, when lunch was still on, I contemplated the walk from Union Station to Michigan Avenue. Not too cold. Would a raincoat do? Yes. And what if I got shot? (Is that crazy? My hunch is, it’s exactly the calculus people perform nowadays.) No worries: I’ll tell my wife to bring the laptop to the hospital, so I could write up the experience. That would make a gripping Wednesday column …

But would it satisfy readers demanding more about shootings? Probably not. Whatever I write about, they pepper me with with complaints: “Waffles! You’re a joke! Write about the 800 murders in Chicago?!” You’d think that would be coming from city residents frantic over the crime spike. But they’re always from people who obviously a) don’t live anywhere near Chicago and b) don’t seem to really care much about urban crime or the people it affects.

Rather, they are are angry red-staters trying to score points on the Fox World tally board. Crime is a real tragedy and constant worry in Chicago, even among those of us with little to worry about. But elsewhere it’s a schoolyard taunt, the kind of look-a-squirrel whataboutism that passes for argument.

What’s there to say? Murder is up in Chicago because it’s up everywhere. That’s no big secret. “The U.S. murder rate rose 30 percent between 2019 and 2020 — the largest single-year increase in more than a century,” the Pew Research Center reported two months ago.

And 2021 is just as bad. A dozen cities will break their all-time murder records. Chicago isn’t one of them.

What’s to be done? Chicago’s murder rate is far higher than New York’s or Los Angeles’s. When you parse reasons — our gangs are worse, as is our police department — rather than demand action, it points to its futility. Vigorous law enforcement made gangs worse, by breaking up large, established gangs into countless mini-gangs, increasing the slaughter by being less, for want of a better word, disciplined. And any attempts to reform or hold accountable police only makes them sulky and sad and thus, they do their jobs even less effectively, which encourages crime.

Given the track record of action, maybe inaction is called for. But no mayor is going to demand that. Not when they can project an aura of Doing Something.

Returning to the Bears. Even the brief time I watched, two moments stood out.

First, the camera cut to a boisterous fan, his face painted blue and orange, wearing some furry bear outfit. I think he had claws. Anyway, he was in the stands, wildly cheering and, well, I appreciated his efforts. Me, I had difficulty turning on the TV and focusing my attention for a quarter hour. This guy bought face paint, applied it — quite skillfully — then hied himself to Soldier Field. Probably paid for the privilege too, and no thanks from anybody. So I’ll thank him. Thank you, Mr. Face-Painted Bears Fan. You were encouraging, somehow. Perhaps as a display of faith unshaken. A beautiful thing.

The other, opposite moment was when the camera cut to Bears general manager Ryan Pace. He had this expression of — how to describe it? — focused grimness. Intense, desolate hopelessness. Suppressed anger.

“Look at his face!” I marveled to my wife.

I’m sure Pace was concentrating on the flaming train wreck before him. But really, he seemed to be expressing some general civic malaise. Something tells me the whole next month, maybe all of 2022, is going to be just like that, long after the Bears stop embarrassing themselves.

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A 3-year-old boy died in a house fire late Tuesday morning in West Pullman on the Far South Side.

His mother tried rescue to boy from the second-floor room where a small fire started, but was unable to and escaped with burns to her body, according to Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford.

Firefighters arrived at the home in the 12200 block of Lafayette Avenue and pulled the child from room around 11:30 a.m., Langford said.

Paramedics took him in cardiac arrest to Roseland Community Hospital. Despite resuscitation efforts from firefighters and hospital staff, the child was pronounced dead.

The mother was taken to the same hospital, where her condition stabilized, Langford said. Two other women in the home refused medical attention.

The fire was small and contained inside of the house, Langford said. The damage was mostly to the carpet and interior items.

Investigators were “paying attention” to a space heater inside the room where the fire started, but it was too early to determine the fire’s cause, he said.

There was no working smoke detector in the home, Langford said, adding that a working smoke detector could have alerted people downstairs.

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The 10 NBA teams with games scheduled on Christmas were told by the league Tuesday that shifting some game times is a possibility for the planned five-game slate if virus-related issues force changes to the lineup.

The league told the teams the priority is filling the ABC windows for Saturday’s games, which means the slots at 2:30 p.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. Eastern. For now, those games, in order, would have Boston at Milwaukee, Golden State at Phoenix and Brooklyn at the Los Angeles Lakers.

The other games on the Christmas schedule are Atlanta at New York at noon Eastern, and Dallas at Utah at 10:30 p.m. Eastern. Both of those games are scheduled to be shown on ESPN.

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The league called the notion of shifting game times — which might happen if a game is postponed — a contingency plan in the memo distributed to the teams involved and obtained by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. Decisions on whether shifting times is needed could come as late as Friday. Any decisions made on Saturday to postpone a Christmas game would not impact the remainder of the day’s schedule, the league said.

The NBA has postponed seven games so far this season, but none from Wednesday onward yet. About 75 players have been dealing with virus-related issues this week alone in the NBA, with more than 100 having done so at least once this season.

Some of the teams scheduled to play on Saturday have numerous players and coaches in the league’s health and safety protocols right now; the Nets currently have 10 players on that list, which is the highest known figure for any team.

The 10 teams scheduled to play on Christmas had more than 30 players in the protocols on Tuesday afternoon, though those numbers can change quickly.

Other top NBA players were being added to the protocols list Tuesday, including Toronto’s Fred VanVleet and Atlanta teammates Danilo Gallinari and Clint Capela — joining a Hawks list that already included Trae Young. The league is allowing teams to sign replacements to hardship contracts when a player tests positive for the virus, with hopes such moves can minimize the need for postponements.

There were some notable removals from the protocols list Tuesday. The Lakers said Dwight Howard and Talen Horton-Tucker would be available to play Tuesday night against Phoenix. But Lakers coach Frank Vogel and four players remain out, all because of protocols.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

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Just one week ago, it was Breshad Perriman who went from never used on the Chicago Bears to scoring a game-winning touchdown off the hands of Tom Brady.

Perriman never saw the field for the Bears, who chose to release him just days before he signed back with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It was Matt Nagy’s decision to keep Perriman off the field for some reason, but after that overtime game-winner, one had to wonder why the league’s worst passing offense couldn’t at least give Perriman a shot.

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