A 14-year-old boy was shot in his home early Thursday in West Pullman on the Far South Side.

The teen boy was in his living room about 12:35 a.m. in the first block of Easr 119th Street when someone outiside fired shots into the front window, Chicago police said.

A bullet struck him in the abdomen and he was taken to Comer Children’s Hospital, where he was stabilized, police said.

Area Two detectives are investigating.

Read More

A man was shot to death late Wednesday night outside a Homan Square gas station.

The 36-year-old was at the gas station about 10:15 p.m. in the 3700 block of West Roosevelt Road when two people inside a gray car fired shots, Chicago police said.

He suffered multiple gunshot wounds on the body and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said. He hasn’t been identified.

No arrests were made as Area Four detectives investigate.

Read More

Read More

It had been a while since the Cubs had swept a series, and after taking Game 1 of the doubleheader Wednesday against the Rockies, they had a chance to do just that.

The offense has carried the Cubs during their first two games against Colorado. After Rafael Ortega’s walk-off homer on Monday and Patrick Wisdom’s heroics in Game 1, it looked like the offense was going to carry them again in the nightcap.

The lineup wasn’t able to come through a final time in the Cubs’ 13-10 loss to the Rockies on Wednesday and dropping Game 2 of the doubleheader.

“These guys have fought to the end a lot,” manager David Ross said. “Sometimes, the pitching gets the best of us, but the effort, the intent and the focus is there night in and night out. We’re gonna make some mistakes at times. But the way this group goes about it, they’re locked into every pitch and engaged.”

After falling behind 2-0 in the first inning, the Cubs’ offense went to work, opening the bottom of the second inning with four consecutive hits. Not only did they respond with a five-run inning against Rockies ace German Marquez, but they also got left-hander Justin Steele off the hook.

After Steele left the game in the fourth, it was up to the bullpen, and things did not go well. Cubs relievers allowed six unanswered runs over the next three innings, including a fourth-inning grand slam.

Each time it seemed like the Cubs were knocked down, the offense kept getting back up, including a response in the seventh inning.

Matt Duffy led off the inning with a single before Frank Schwindel added an infield single to bring the tying run to the plate. Ian Happ got a pitch to hit and didn’t waste his chance, hitting a towering three-run homer into the left-center field basket to tie the game at 8-8.

The Cubs also came back with a game-tying run in the eighth on a throwing error by Rockies shortstop Trevor Story.

The Rockies scored two more runs in the inning on a two-run double by Brendan Rodgers.

The game wasn’t the best outing for the Cubs’ bullpen. Trevor Megill, Rex Brothers, Michael Rucker and Jake Jewell combined to allow a total of seven earned runs in the game. The one bright spot out of the bullpen was right-hander Adrian Sampson, who did not allow an earned run in two innings, enabling the Cubs to stay in the game late.

The game also was not the best outing for Steele, who made his third start of the season. He allowed five earned runs over 3 2/3 innings with two walks and five strikeouts. The Cubs’ left-hander has made it through five innings just once since joining the team’s rotation.

“I wish my fastball command would have been a little bit better,” Steele said. “I made some mistakes over the plate. Just wasn’t commanding both sides of the plate. That’s something I need to work on moving forward. Threw both my breaking pitches tonight. Threw my changeup, but yeah, I’d say fastball command is something I need to work on.”

“He’s still growing,” Ross said. “I’ll talk to him and we’ll reassess after the off-day. … I think there’s a huge upside potential in there. But tonight, I don’t think it was his best.”

The Cubs were unable to capture their first sweep since June 11-13 against the Cardinals. But they won just their fourth series since the All-Star break after taking the first two games of the series.

Read More

LOS ANGELES — A 30-year-old man who appeared nude at 4 months old in 1991 on the cover of Nirvana’s classic “Nevermind” album is suing the band and others, alleging the image is child pornography they have profited from.

The suit, filed by Spencer Elden on Tuesday in federal court in California, alleges that Nirvana and the record labels behind the album “intentionally commercially marketed Spencer’s child pornography and leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense.”

The suit says Elden has suffered “lifelong damages” from the ubiquitous image of him naked underwater appearing to swim after a dollar bill on a fish hook.

It seeks at least $150,000 from each of more than a dozen defendants, including the Kurt Cobain estate, surviving Nirvana members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, and Geffen Records.

Emails seeking comment from representatives for the defendants were not immediately returned.

Elden is filing the lawsuit now because he “finally has the courage to hold these actors accountable,” one of his attorneys, Maggie Mabie, told The Associated Press Wednesday.

Mabie said despite the photo being 30 years old, the suit is within the statute of limitations of federal child pornography law for several reasons, including the fact that the image is still in circulation and earning money.

Elden also wants any new versions of the album altered.

“If there is a 30th anniversary re-release, he wants for the entire world not to see his genitals,” Mabie said.

When the cover was shot, Nirvana was a little-known grunge band with no sense they were making a generation-defining album in “Nevermind,” their first major label release, whose songs included “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Come as You Are” and “Lithium.”

Elden’s father was a friend of the photographer, Kirk Weddle, who took pictures of several swimming babies in several scenarios at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center in Pasadena, California.

“Cobain chose the image depicting Spencer — like a sex worker — grabbing for a dollar bill that is positioned dangling from a fishhook in front of his nude body with his penis explicitly displayed,” the lawsuit says.

Elden has recreated the image several times, always with clothes or swim trunks on, for anniversaries of the album’s release, and has expressed mixed feelings about it in interviews that have grown increasingly negative through the years.

He told the New York Post in 2015 that it was “cool but weird to be part of something so important that I don’t even remember.”

He added, “It’d be nice to have a quarter for every person that has seen my baby penis.”

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been victims of sexual abuse, but may when they have repeatedly come forward publicly, as Elden has.

Read More

You all remember Lucas Giolito, staff ace?

It was only a year ago, and the year before that, when Giolito held the title for the White Sox. A sluggish start — by his standards — coupled with All-Star first halves from right-hander Lance Lynn and Carlos Rodon — loosened Giolito’s grip on that distinction.

But here he comes again.

The 27-year-old right-hander’s one-run performance over six innings in a 3-1 loss to the Jays Wednesday was his latest strong start. Seeing it go for naught after the Jays scored two runs against Aaron Bummer in the eighth inning as the Sox dropped to 2-4 on their current road trip against the Jays and Rays was unsettling.

But seeing Giolito (3.68 ERA) give up five hits and one walk while striking out six, dropping his ERA to 2.77 over his eight starts since the All-Star break, softened the blow for a first-place team (73-55) that is 19-20 since the All-Star break and has scored seven runs in the last four games.

“I’m not too concerned with where we’re at right now,” Giolito said. “Some guys offensively are not getting those big hits in certain situations or stringing things together. We lost but we were in it the whole time. Guys are working through stuff — we’ll pick each other up, we have confidence in each other and we’ll start to get hot again and play solid baseball leading to the playoffs.”

Giolito got 19 swings and misses, most of them with his changeup, but he had no margin for error in a matchup with Jays left-hander Robbie Ray, who struck out 14 in seven innings of one-run ball. Right fielder Leury Garcia singled, stole two bases and scored on Yoan Moncada’s bloop single to right in the third inning for the Sox only run.

The Jays, fighting for a Wild Card spot, tied it in the fourth on Corey Dickerson’s RBI triple with two outs that sailed over Garcia’s head, and they went ahead in the eighth when Bummer gave up three straight singles, the third one by Alejandro Kirk scoring Teoscar Hernandez.

The Sox have three good starts in the series but one win to show for it, although manager Tony La Russa said “the two losses were not bullpen breakdowns.”

An error by Moncada on a ground ball, and a bases loaded walk to Randal Grichuk by Jose Ruiz gave the Jays an extra run.

Giolito, meanwhile, showed his versatility by leaning on his bread and butter changeup Wednesday after he had gone to the slider more in his last two starts. He had inadvertently “messed up the grip with my changeup” early in the season but corrected it. He also evolved from a two-pitch — four-seam fastball and changeup — pitcher to a three-pitch hurler, adding an effective slider to his mix, especially in his last three starts.

“I wouldn’t say I ever lost confidence with my stuff at any point in the season,” Giolito said. “It was just frustration with lack of results. And we just had to make a few adjustments to where now I feel like I’m in a much better place pitching, about as well as I can. I just want to keep improving.”

Giolito said the highlight of his career was pitching in the postseason last year, when he beat the Athletics in Game 1 of the Wild Card. He says he’s not looking ahead to his next playoff appearance.

“Not really, because we still have something like 40 games left and we have to stay on top of what we need to do,” he said. “I know the division lead is big and the coaching staff is finding ways to give players rest when they need it and make sure we’re prepared for the playoffs but we’ve got to stay focused on our day to day, game to game. We need to win this game and maintain that mentality going right into the postseason.”

Read More

Just three days before Jamar Jason Taylor was killed by Amtrak police in a rush-hour shootout inside Union Station, the convicted felon was allegedly caught on video carrying out a fatal shooting in northern California, court records show.

Taylor, 33, of San Leandro, California, had hopped an Amtrak train from his home state Tuesday, the same day a warrant was issued for his arrest for the murder in nearby Oakland, according to court documents obtained by the Sun-Times. A document for probable cause, filed Tuesday in Alameda County, California, shows that Taylor was sought in the fatal shooting Saturday morning in Oakland.

About 9:20 a.m. that night, Oakland police officers responded to a ShotSpotter alert in the 8800 block of International Boulevard and found someone suffering from a gunshot wound that proved fatal, the document states. The East Bay Times, a local newspaper, identified the victim as a 55-year-old man.

Officers ultimately recovered “clear high definition” video surveillance footage of Taylor and a “suspect vehicle,” according to the document for probable cause.

The warrant shows that Taylor was being sought for murder, illegally possessing a gun as a felon and a host of other allegations. He was on probation at the time of his death.

Taylor already had one strike under California law, according to the warrant, meaning he had already been convicted of a violent or serious felony. His previous convictions included making criminal threats, attempted grand theft person, second-degree commercial burglary and driving under the influence, according to the warrant.

Tom Ahern, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department, said a law enforcement agency in California alerted Amtrak Police that Taylor was headed to Chicago on a train from northern California and that he was wanted on multiple warrants, including the one for murder.

“They checked the manifest and corroborate that information and then are waiting for him here,” Ahern said of Amtrak Police.

When Amtrak officers confronted Taylor after he got off the train at Union Station, he started running and knocked over a couple Amtrak employees before firing a shot at one of the officers, Ahern said. The officer then returned fire, striking him in the chest.

Taylor was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital and later pronounced dead, according to Ahern and the Cook County medical examiner’s office. A semiautomatic handgun was recovered at the scene, Ahern said.

The Amtrak employee suffered minor injuries, and an Amtrak officer was also taken to the hospital for evaluation, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said. No other injuries were reported.

Ahern noted that CPD investigators conducted interviews at the scene, took the initial case report and are now “working jointly with the Amtrak police.” Magliari said Chicago police will complete its report and provide it to Amtrak’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which reviews use-of-force incidents like the fatal officer-involved shooting.

It’s still unclear why the Amtrak officers were charged with intercepting a felon wanted for murder, instead of the U.S. Marshals Service, which assists state and local agencies in apprehending violent fugitives.

Magliari directed questions about the deployment of the marshals to the federal agency, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Read More

Chicago police tout ShotSpotter, a technology that senses gunfire and summons police, as an important crime-fighting tool. But in a scathing report this week, the Chicago inspector general’s office said police records are too incomplete to verify that claim.

The police department, as a first step, should do a better job of tracking what happens after ShotSpotter sounds an alarm.

Ideally, anytime there is a shooting in those parts of the city where ShotSpotter is installed, police will get there quickly enough to apprehend culprits and aid victims. If that happens often enough, the police could justify the $33 million that has been spent on ShotSpotter in the past three years, with a recent two-year renewal.

But at the end of its report, the IG’s office said police record-keeping, including so-called investigatory stop reports, is just too limited to give a clear picture of how much ShotSpotter helps police — its so-called operational value.

And it’s not just the IG’s office that’s asking questions about ShotSpotter. Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th) told us he and other City Council members want to learn more about the inner workings of the system and associated data, so the city can use it most effectively.

ShotSpotter is operating in 12 police districts, mostly on the South and West sides. The IG’s office examined 50,176 ShotSpotter alerts from January 2020 through May. Police documented a response to those alerts 42,000 times, but officers wound up making “investigatory stop reports” — essentially confirming gun-related criminal activity — only 9.1% of the time. Other reports referenced the technology but didn’t correlate with a specific ShotSpotter notification.

Various reasons could account for that. The shooters and witnesses could have left the scene before police arrived. Responding police might have chosen not to search the area for shell casings, which are evidence of gunfire but don’t show whether bullets were flying moments or days before police got there.

Without more complete reporting — and this is crux of the problem — it’s hard to judge whether responding to ShotSpotter alerts is the best use of police time.

According to the Brookings Institution, data from Washington, D.C., and Oakland, California, show that people call 911 only 12% of the time when there is gunfire. The Chicago police department says ShotSpotter has detected hundreds of shootings that otherwise would have gone unreported. The department says ShotSpotter is “crucial” because it flags incidents when no one calls 911, giving them a chance to “respond more quickly to locate and aid victims, identify witnesses and collect forensic evidence.”

But the IG’s office says the record-keeping isn’t good enough to show how frequently that’s happening, which rules out a dependable cost-benefit analysis.

The concern over ShotSpotter is part of a larger debate that Chicago and other cities are having over striking a new balance between civil rights and privacy and how police forces work to keep us safe. Cameras in public places, especially cell phone cameras, now frequently document how police behave. Recently developed DNA technology has showed some people have been wrongfully convicted. The evidence has mounted that reforms of police practices are necessary.

Struggling with the pros and cons of ShotSpotter resembles the debates over having police officers in schools and how authorities (not just the police) should respond to calls involving somebody who might be mentally ill. Just on Wednesday in Chicago, there were news stories on all of these issues.

Going forward, city officials will have to decide whether to keep using SpotSpotter or change the system or discontinue it. To get that decision right, police need to sort how often, in incidents where no one else notifies police of a shooting, ShotSpotter leads to an arrest, helps solve a case or assists a victim.

That’s critical information in a city where bullets fly every day.

Send letters to [email protected].

Read More

A murder suspect fatally shot by Amtrak police inside Union Station has been identified as a man from California’s Bay Area.

Jamar Jason Taylor, 33, of San Leandro, California was killed in the shooting Tuesday evening, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

Amtrak police were waiting on the platform for a train, having been notified by authorities in California that an individual on the train heading for Chicago had multiple pending warrants, including one for murder, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said at a news conference Tuesday night.

When the man saw the uniformed officers on the platform, he took off running, injuring an Amtrak employee and then opening fire on the officers, Magliari said.

An Amtrak officer returned fire and struck Taylor, Magliari said. The Amtrak employee suffered minor injuries, and an officer was also taken to the hospital for evaluation, he said.

Taylor was transported to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in traumatic arrest, according to Chicago fire spokesman Larry Merritt. He was pronounced dead about an hour later.

Amtrak and the Chicago Police Department are investigating the incident jointly.

Read More

Coach Prime, aka Deion Sanders, sauntered into the office of Nick Saban with a marching band following his lead.

“Coach Prime, what, no smoke machine?” the Alabama coach quizzically asked.

Yep, that happened — in a scene for an Aflac commercial featuring the two high-profile college head coaches.

It’s the sort of splash Sanders hopes to make this fall in his second season at Jackson State. With that, another objective: Raising the profile of schools such as Jackson State and other historically Black colleges and universities.

“We’re going to fight and do our darndest to start changing the landscape of HBCU football,” Sanders said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Then, consequently, we can go to the next step and the next level. The fight is not going to be easy. Getting the players to commit to a historically Black college is not easy because you’ve got to level the playing field.

“You’re competing against a Power Five that has 100 times more resources than we do, and the exposure,” said Sanders, whose upcoming docuseries “Coach Prime” will debut Sunday on Barstool Sports. “So it’s not a level playing field whatsoever. But with the type of person that’s coming to these historical Black colleges, I think we can.”

Sanders took full advantage of his time on the commercial set with Saban, the architect behind six national championship teams with the Crimson Tide. Sanders even brought some of his staff with him. In between commercial takes, they talked X’s and O’s.

“Nick Saban to a coach is like heaven,” said Sanders, who partnered with Aflac in an effort to help close support gaps for HBCUs. “That’s like a basketball player meeting (Michael) Jordan.”

It’s not the first time he’s chatted with Saban. They also got acquainted when Saban was recruiting one of Sanders’ sons, two of whom are currently on the Tigers roster.

“Definitely (can learn from Saban), just being on the set, seeing how he handles the staff, see how he handles himself, seeing the football side of it,” said Sanders, who was brought on board at Jackson State, located in Mississippi, last September.

The first step in turning around a Tigers team that competes in the Southwestern Athletic Conference was introducing a new mindset. So far, so good. They went 4-3 in a spring campaign.

This fall, a bigger test. His team opens with Florida A&M on Sept. 5 in the Orange Blossom Classic. It will be shown on ESPN2, one of eight times Jackson State is scheduled to appear on an ESPN network.

“I have so much hope,” said Sanders, a Hall of Famer and two-time Super Bowl champion. “I’m optimistic all the time and I look for the good in everything and everybody.”

The charismatic Sanders has leaned on his ties to help orchestrate change. The football uniforms for the Tigers were provided by Under Armour, while Sanders said Walmart assisted with a new turf field.

“That was like Santa Claus coming to town,” Sanders said of the uniforms, which he proudly displayed in various blue, white and red combinations in a YouTube post. “The new field? Now we don’t have to drive 15 minutes just to practice because the field was unplayable. All of those things are wonderful. It’s really appreciated. Just thankful.”

His association with Aflac includes a $75,000 donation to the Jackson State’s athletic department along with the company being a support partner of Sanders’ football camp. The supplemental insurance provider has been a long-time supporter of HBCUs, including a $1 million commitment to the Morehouse School of Medicine and donations to HBCU-focused college football events.

“Oftentimes, all these kids need is that push and exposure and that’s what we’re trying to bring simultaneously,” Sanders said. “I know it’s going to happen.”

Sanders is plenty busy these days getting ready for the season. He’s out the door around 5:15 a.m. each morning and to work by 5:40, where he works out on the elliptical machine followed crunches (he does 2,400 crunches a week). Then, it’s breakfast with the team — he sits at a different table each day — meetings, practice, more meetings and a re-watch of practice film.

After lunch, there are interviews with the media, a team walkthrough, more meetings, dinner and finally home around 9 p.m.

“That’s my day,” Sanders said with a laugh. “My niece and nephew came up to spend some time with me last week and I brought them with me every day. They said, ‘Uncle Deion, we leave when it’s dark and we come home when it’s dark.’ I said, ‘Welcome to my life.’ They’re like, ‘We didn’t even get to swim.'”

Read More