OKLAHOMA CITY — Current Oklahoma and former Illinois coach Lon Kruger announced his retirement on Thursday, culminating a 35-year career that included taking five different schools to the NCAA Tournament — with two of them reaching the Final Four — and more than 650 career wins.
Kruger, 68, led Florida to the national semifinals in 1994 and Oklahoma to the same spot in 2016. He is the only coach to lead five different programs to NCAA Tournament wins — Oklahoma, Kansas State, Florida, Illinois and UNLV.
Kruger coached the Illini for four seasons, from 1996-2000. The Illini won the Big Ten regular season championship in 1997-98 and reached the NCAA Tournament in 1997, 1998 and 2000. Overall, Kruger was 81-48 in Champaign.
His 674-432 career record ranks 10th among active coaches in wins and 27th all time.
He led the Sooners to a 195-128 record in 10 years and reached seven of the past eight NCAA tournaments. In his final season at Oklahoma, the Sooners went 16-11 and ended with a loss to top-seeded Gonzaga in the second round on Monday.
Along the way, he built a reputation for fixing struggling programs.
“His track record of successfully rebuilding programs everywhere he coached is made even more impressive when considering how he did it,” Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said. “He won with integrity, humility, class and grace. He did it with superior leadership skills and a genuine kindness that included his constant encouragement of everyone around him.”
Among his many accomplishments, he was voted the AP Big 12 Coach of the Year in 2014. He led his alma mater, Kansas State, to the Elite Eight in 1988. He also coached at Texas Pan American. He was the 2019 recipient of the John R. Wooden Legends of Coaching Award and honored in 2017 with the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) Metropolitan Award for long and outstanding service to men’s college basketball.
Kruger coached first-round draft picks Buddy Hield and Trae Young. Hield was named Big 12 Player of the Year in both 2015 and 2016 and left Oklahoma as the Big 12’s all-time leading scorer. Young was the first player in college basketball history to lead the country in both points and assists.
“The tremendous success he enjoyed on the court over the last four decades, the meaningful mentorship role he served with players and staff, his dedication to trying to improve the lives of others — it’s a career he should certainly be proud of and that people should really take the time to study and appreciate,” Castiglione said.
Kruger also spent four years coaching in the NBA — three as head coach of the Atlanta Hawks and one as a New York Knicks assistant.
Just last week, longtime Oklahoma women’s basketball Sherri Coale also announced her retirement.
A Chicago cop facing termination for allegedly lying about a fatal police shooting on the West Side will retire next month, his attorneys announced Thursday.
Officer Saharat Sampim, a 22-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, was accused of making false statements about the 2014 police killing of 19-year-old Roshad McIntosh. Sampim testified that he saw McIntosh point a gun at Officer Robert Slecter, who shot and killed the teen.
An attorney representing Sampim announced Thursday that Sampim was retiring from the police force during a meeting related to his disciplinary case, said Max Caproni, executive director of the Chicago Police Board. His resignation will take effect April 30.
Caproni said attorneys for Supt. David Brown have moved to withdraw the disciplinary charge against Sampim. The Police Board could rule on whether to terminate those charges as early as next month’s meeting, Caproni said.
Sampim’s attorney, Tim Grace, said retirement was “the best thing for him and his family.”
“He’s served his city honorably for many years,” Grace said in an interview. “It’s very difficult to be a police officer nowadays. I think a lot of police officers are starting to realize that. And I think the people that are really going to get hurt are the citizens.”
Asked why his client didn’t choose to fight the charges against him, Grace noted that “not many people survive the Police Board.”
“What’s that old saying? Fight the fights that are worth fighting,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just not worthwhile to engage in a fight that you really don’t have the heart for.”
Andrew M. Stroth, an attorney representing McIntosh’s mother in a federal lawsuit against the city, said he believes Sampim is dodging accountability by tendering his resignation.
“How can we have a system and rules that when an officer is proven to do something wrong, the Police Board, if the officer resigns, has no jurisdiction to prosecute the case,” said Stroth.
“Officer Sampim was part of the blue code of silence and he made false statements,” he added. “And it’s devastating to the family and disappointing that the officer responsible in part is not facing any consequences.”
McIntosh was shot and killed by Slechter in August 2014 in the 2800 block of West Polk Street after he pointed a handgun at an officer, police and COPA say.
Officers were called to the block after receiving a tip two men there were armed with guns. Once there, officers found the block crowded with dozens of people. But only McIntosh ran away when they arrived.
An officer who chased McIntosh said he saw the teen grab his waistband, which is a common sign that someone is carrying a gun. COPA said the officer who fired said he ordered McIntosh to drop the gun several times — a claim corroborated by several police and civilian witnesses.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson shared a rosy view earlier this month of the district’s relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union.
“It is a collaborative process,” she said of negotiations over a plan to reopen high schools, which have remained closed during the pandemic. “There is a different tone and tenor than it was during the first step of negotiations around this. And I hope that that’s comforting to parents.”
Families know that initial phase of bargaining all too well.
Earlier this year, the district and union went blow for blow for two months. A second teachers strike in as many years felt inevitable at times but was ultimately avoided. As negotiations on high schools began, students, parents, teachers, the union and the district hoped the two sides could move forward and mend a relationship that had become perhaps the most toxic in the nation between a school system and its union.
The weeks since haven’t been as bitter, but the tension is still apparent.
Frustrations boil over
Take, for example, the frustration that boiled over last week.
CPS leadership sent an email to families and staff early in the week with a few small updates, including a “target” high school reopening date of April 19. The district made clear negotiations with the union were “productive” and ongoing, but parents have been asking for more information for weeks.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson speaks during a press conference in January where she announced that the district would continue with the return to in-person learning despite staff’s concerns.Pat Nabong/Sun-Times, Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
A few hours later, the CTU released a statement that said, in part: “We have no agreement.” The union criticized the district’s announcement as “more unilateralism” and accused CPS of distorting the status of negotiations.
The only problem? CTU President Jesse Sharkey had reviewed the email and suggested edits earlier that afternoon.
The district’s labor relations chief, Kaitlyn Girard, told Sharkey in an email hours earlier that “we have drafted what we think is a non-controversial overview of our discussions to share with families later today. … Please let us know your thoughts on this language, we can also discuss during our meeting this afternoon.”
Sharkey provided two suggested changes, both of which the district made.
And how did reporters find out about that email exchange? At 11 p.m. the day the email was sent, in a highly unusual move, a CPS spokeswoman sent education reporters a screenshot of the conversation — this from a district that regularly delays and denies public information requests. CPS wanted to draw negative attention to Sharkey’s inconsistent private actions and public message.
Trench warfare
Instead of backing down and deescalating, both CPS and CTU are continuing to play the game that has caused so much turmoil over the past two years. It seems they’ve had a hard time forgetting the 2019 strike, or the late Friday night mayoral press conference that trashed the union last month, or the CTU’s vote of no-confidence in Mayor Lori Lightfoot after the reopening agreement was reached.
“There have been examples of this, where the parties, their disagreements just kind of convert into trench warfare, where they’re dug in and the way in which they’re relating to one another suggests these real deep divides,” said Bob Bruno, a labor professor at the University of Illinois who has studied CPS-CTU negotiations and wrote a book on the 2012 teachers strike.
“What it begins to do is raise lots of questions about the larger institutional settings in which everyone connected to it suffers.”
And what about the one-third of teachers with work-from-home accommodations for third quarter? Should they go back to classrooms in the fourth quarter if they’re vaccinated?
“Provided it’s medically OK, if somebody gets vaccinated, yeah they should teach in-person if there’s a need for that,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in an interview. “I don’t think that’s a problem.”
Sharkey said “it’s a little bit more complicated” if a teacher received an accommodation for a medically vulnerable household member because there is a risk in bringing the virus home since it’s not known yet whether vaccinations prevent transmission. He also said he was frustrated that CPS didn’t know how many workers had received a shot.
Fast forward seven days and it was a different tune.
In an email to members, Sharkey said teachers shouldn’t respond to a CPS survey asking workers to disclose whether they’ve been vaccinated; he instead insisted it be negotiated with CPS. Vaccinations were among the union’s biggest demands in K-8 bargaining. Last week, Jackson said only 41% of CPS staff have responded, and she was “disappointed” to learn of Sharkey’s message to members.
Then in a CBS2 Chicago story published one week after the Sun-Times interview, Sharkey said teachers weren’t fully on board with disclosing their vaccination status because some feared losing their accommodations.
week, when the district announced a provider had misallocated 6,000 doses meant for CPS staff, Sharkey ripped the district for the “failure, on multiple levels, from the people who run our school district” — despite the fact CPS relented to union demands to make sure all teachers were offered vaccines in the first place and said no teacher will miss out on a dose due to the situation.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot discusses the ongoing negotiations and plans for returning to School during a press conference to address the ongoing dispute between the Chicago Teachers Union and CPS over whether schools are safe enough to return to at 42 W Madison St. in the Loop, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2021. | Anthony Vazquez/Sun-TimesAnthony Vazquez, Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
CPS and the mayor, of course, have had their own hand in stoking the fire. In an interview with the New York Times after the K-8 agreement, Lightfoot again compared the CTU to the police union and claimed schools never would have opened without mayoral control of the district. In other interviews she blamed the CTU for parents becoming fed up and leaving the district and city altogether.
Many CPS families — especially Black, Latino and special education parents — appreciate the CTU’s advocacy and recognize many needed improvements in the district would not have come without the CTU’s support.
And yet there’s a difference between fighting for a cause and unnecessarily needling.
“Black and Brown working class communities in Chicago … they have deep grievances against CPS,” Bruno said. “The idea of supporting what the union does is because they believe that the union brings generally good returns for those families.
” … [But] I don’t think there’s endless tolerance or patience for dysfunction. If there’s dysfunction and chaos, then obviously those families will be impacted.”
Burning down the village
The school system has always been political. And the union — after a building a grassroots political movement over the past decade and now regaining more of its previously stripped bargaining rights — is as mighty as ever.
But at a certain point, the politics become exhausting for families and educators, and it certainly no longer benefits the children. Jackson and Sharkey have said so themselves. Yet neither side seems ready to accept that the situation has become untenable.
“You’re kind of burning down the village to win the war,” Bruno said.
Chicago eases outdoor dining restrictions; most indoor rules remain in place
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Thursday authorized bars, restaurants and outdoor performance venues to increase outdoor capacity even as she sounded the alarm about a troubling surge in coronavirus cases among young people.
The news arrived as Chicago’s coronavirus testing positivity rate took another troubling step up.
What Lightfoot calls an “alarming trend and uptick” reminiscent of the surge Chicago saw in October is concentrated among 18-to-39-year-olds living in North Side neighborhoods including Lincoln Park, Old Town, Old Irving, Dunning and Portage Park.
“This is a cohort that we’ve had varied challenges throughout the pandemic reaching. Young people. We were all young once. We all think we’re invincible. We never think something bad is going to happen to us. And the reality is that young people have gotten sick. Very sick. And young people have died from COVID,” Lightfoot said.
“We can’t do bar crawls. We can’t do mass events. And I’m concerned with spring break happening — both for colleges and schools — that this is a concerning trend,” the mayor said.
Tough as it is to break through, the city needs to “reach them where they are”–through “a tremendous amount of messaging through texting and social media.”
“We’re gonna continue to push to reach this group and say, `COVID is real. It has not gone away from our city. It’s still very much part of our present….The vaccines are obviously giving us a ray of light at the end of a very dark tunnel,” but it’s not time to let down your guard.
4:33 p.m. California to open vaccinations to everyone 16 and older
SANTA ANA, Calif. — California is expanding its coronavirus vaccine eligibility to anyone 50 and over starting in April and anyone 16 and over on April 15.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that California expects to receive 2.5 million doses a week in the first half of April and more than 3 million a week in the second half of the month. That’s a big jump from the roughly 1.8 million doses a week the state currently gets.
“In just a few weeks, there’ll be no rules, no limitations, as it relates to the ability to get a vaccine administered,” Newsom said at a news conference in Orange County. “This state is going to come roaring back.”
The move comes as some California counties have veered away from the state’s vaccine eligibility criteria by opening up the shots for people with a broader range of medical conditions than those required in most places, and in some cases, at younger ages.
Newsom said the state will continue to target underserved communities by working with labor groups to reach essential workers and letting health providers target vaccinations by ZIP code.
California’s announcement comes as governors across the country have expanded eligibility for the vaccine as supplies have increased. Florida said Thursday it will open eligibility to anyone 18 and older on April 5, while New York has expanded eligibility to anyone 50 and up.
3:58 p.m. Lightfoot not satisfied with Loretto exec’s resignation
The resignation of the Loretto Hospital executive at the center of a coronavirus vaccination scandal hasn’t put out the political fire with Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Saying she knows of “at least one other story in the works” with potential to embarrass Loretto, Lightfoot demanded Thursday that the hospital hire an independent auditor to detect the problems that allowed its vaccination campaign to be hijacked by the politically connected and “come clean about it.”
The mayor seemed duly unimpressed that Anosh Ahmed, Loretto’s chief operating officer, had resigned after a week of revelations about what she called “misappropriated precious vaccine” at a West Side hospital whose “core responsibility” is serving low-income Black communities.
“They need to come clean about every instance in which vaccine has been committed to people that don’t fit into that West Side footprint and tell us about it. Audit, detect the problems and then, come clean about it,” Lightfoot said during a conference call with City Hall reporters.
“I’ve been reassured repeatedly that, ‘Oh, mayor. We’re doing that.’ But clearly, that’s not true. And so now, it feels like it’s death by a thousand cuts for them. My understanding is there’s at least one other story in the works. So they’ve got to take care of their business. They’ve got to do a fulsome audit. And they’ve got to own responsibility for what has happened. That has not happened yet.”
3:02 p.m. Biden doubles goal of COVID vaccines to 200 million doses
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden opened his first formal news conference Thursday with a nod toward the improving picture on battling the coronavirus, but he was immediately pressed on thorny issues, like immigration and voting rights, now testing his administration.
Biden doubled his original goal on COVID-19 vaccines by pledging that the nation will administer 200 million doses by the end of his first 100 days in office. The administration had met Biden’s initial goal of 100 million doses earlier this month — before even his 60th day in office — as the president pushes to defeat a pandemic that has killed more than 545,000 Americans and devastated the nation’s economy.
But while Biden had held off on holding his first news conference so he could use it to celebrate progress against the pandemic and passage of a giant COVID-19 relief package, he was quickly pressed at the question-and-answer session about all sorts of other challenges that have cropped up along the way.
A pair of mass shootings, rising international tensions, early signs of intraparty divisions and increasing numbers of migrants crossing the southern border are all confronting a West Wing known for its message discipline.
“I am going to deal with all of those problems,” Biden pledged.
2:02 p.m. Less than half of CPS students — including 1 in 3 high schoolers — choose 4th quarter in-person learning
An empty hallway is seen at Edward K. Duke Ellington Elementary School in the South Austin neighborhood earlier this year.Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Fewer than half of all CPS students and about one-third of high schoolers have chosen to return to their classrooms later this spring in their last opportunity to resume in-person learning before the fall, according to newly released district data.
Those modest return rates come despite the share of students opting to return increasing from the last time officials asked families, and now including thousands of high school students for whom this was the first chance to make their preferences known.
In all, 121,000 students in all grades and programs said on a survey returned earlier this week that they’re interested in returning to school, CPS said. Another 136,500 opted to continue remote learning, and 20,700 students didn’t answer the survey and will default to virtual schooling.
“These are all very hopeful trends for us,” Sherly Chavarria, CPS’ chief of teaching and learning, said at Wednesday’s virtual Board of Education meeting.
“Too many students have not been well-served by remote learning, and that’s why we’ve been working night and day to offer an in-person option for our high school students.”
Among special education cluster students and those in preschool through eighth grades, 95,000 kids — or 46% of the 205,600 in those programs and grades — chose to return. Tens of thousands of those students have already been in classes. About 77,000 initially opted in last time around — though that dropped to 60,000 by the time K-8 schools reopened earlier this month.
11:14 a.m. The reality of work-at-home Zoom fatigue and how to combat it
Chances are, if you’re someone who began working at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, you’ve found yourself sitting on a Zoom video call when you didn’t want to be on camera.
People have been voicing their frustrations with video conferences on social media throughout the pandemic. Writer Roxane Gay tweeted, “I miss calls where I don’t need to show my face. It doesn’t need to be a Zoom. It just doesn’t.”
There are even web tools, like Zoom Escaper, that allow users to self-sabotage their call, giving them the perfect excuse to leave their virtual meeting.
Melissa Dowd, a therapist at virtual mental health and primary care company PlushCare, says it’s normal for people to feel an “added pressure” to be in front of the camera throughout the day.
“Unlike in-person meetings where the focus might be on one speaker, during Zoom calls everyone is looking at everyone,” she says. “This can be intimidating for some people and cause social anxiety.”
Amy Nicole Baker, professor and assistant chair of psychology and sociology at the University of New Haven, says this blurring of work and home boundaries is one reason it’s important to disengage from video when you can.
“People need time to disengage from work, it is healthy, it actually makes you more productive and actually improves worker well-being,” she says. “The assumption that we’re working from home on Zoom and we’re available any time encroaches on that ability to disengage, and I think that may be part of the reason we’re seeing such Zoom fatigue.”
9:42 a.m. Loretto Hospital executive resigns in wake of COVID-19 vaccination scandal
Anosh Ahmed, the Loretto Hospital executive at the center of a series of COVID-19 vaccination controversies, has resigned, the hospital’s board announced Wednesday night.
The board said it is continuing its investigation into actions taken by Dr. Ahmed, Loretto’s chief operating officer, and Chief Executive Officer George Miller, after a series of reports that hospital executives had taken city-supplied vaccine and used it to inoculate people at the Trump Tower downtown and at other locations, rather than use it for residents of the Austin community that Loretto serves. In some of the cases, the hospital gave shots to those who were not eligible.
“If our review should uncover anything further that indicates our processes were compromised, there will be additional consequences imposed on those responsible for these actions,” Chairman Edward Hogan said in a statement.
About 14% of Illinois’ 12.7 million residents have been fully vaccinated.
The Illinois Department of Public Health reported 2,793 new COVID-19 cases — the most in a day since Feb. 11 — detected among 79,381 tests.
Analysis & Commentary
9:44 a.m. Loretto board can’t afford to duck its responsibility to hold wayward execs accountable
The longer the top executives at Loretto Hospital hang on, the more negative stories are going to come out about how this safety-net hospital is being run.
State Rep. La Shawn Ford knows this.
He resigned from the hospital’s board of directors Tuesday, citing his disappointment with the “reprimands” handed down to CEO George Miller and COO Dr. Anosh Ahmed, for the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination scandal.
“The reason I stepped away was to make sure the hospital regains its confidence that may have been lost, and focus on the community,” Ford told me in a telephone conversation.
“I’m very concerned about the fact that the first doses have been taken away and there are thousands of people that got their first dose and are waiting on their second dose. People are now confused,” he said.
On Wednesday, the board of trustees accepted the resignation of Ahmed, its COO and CFO.
Chairman Edward Hogan thanked Ahmed for his contributions and vowed the board “would continue to investigate any and all deviations from the rules and regulations guiding their vaccination policy.”
“If our review should uncover anything further that indicates our processes were compromised, there will be additional consequences imposed on those responsible for these actions,” Hogan said in a news release.
MESA, Ariz. — Javy Baez is a household name and he’s probably your favorite player’s favorite player.
The swipe tags, elusive slides, mammoth home runs and spectacular defense over the last five years have made him a fan favorite of kids, adults and everyone in between. It’s no shock that Baez is such a draw to kids, because he plays the game like one. His childlike enthusiasm and energy is infectious.
“I love it,” Baez said. “I get really excited to see the way other players and other kids look at the way I play the game and the way I enjoy the game. I always say, it’s a game. It’s a game before anything. … I think you gotta enjoy the game and let your game talk.”
His jersey has been in the top 10 of MLB’s top selling jerseys each of the last four seasons and following the Cubs’ World Series run in 2016, his popularity has grown exponentially.
Not only did that popularity put him on the map, it shot him into superstardom, not only in the United States, but internationally as the Puerto Rico native became a global icon.
But what’s the cost of being everyone’s favorite? For Baez, it was tedious as the mental toll of being everything to everybody slowly made him push back from the game he loved.
Following the 2016 World Series, things didn’t slow down for Baez, not in the slightest. After doing ESPN’s Body Issue in 2017, the opportunities kept coming. The young shortstop was everywhere from the cover of magazines, video games, red carpet events and being seen with some of music’s biggest stars like friend and countrymen, Daddy Yankee.
However, the play on the field never suffered, in fact Baez was beginning to come into his own as a force in MLB, finishing as runner-up in the National League MVP Award voting in 2018 and being named an NL All-Star starter in ’18 and ’19.
What did suffer was that childlike enthusiasm. Yes, he was producing, putting up monster numbers and becoming one of the faces of baseball. But in some ways, he was going through the motions. As different opportunities came up, a little bit of the love he had for the game went with it and even took him away from the people he cared about.
“I wouldn’t say there was pressure, but it was the way I got attention for other stuff than baseball,” Baez told the Sun-Times. “It kind of pulled me away from everything, even from my family. My family and my friends.
“I was grateful to be recognized by all these people, but people weren’t looking at me the way I wanted them to. At the end of the day, I’m a baseball player. That’s what I want to be recognized as.”
For a player who was so often the happiest player on the diamond, the Cubs’ shortstop wasn’t happy and finding that joy again required him to take a step back from the bright lights and decide who he wanted to be.
Everyone wants to be a star and every kid who grows up with the hopes of being a Major League Baseball player wants everything that comes with success, but Baez had to learn how to handle that fame, even if it meant pulling away from some of it.
“You gotta understand it,” Baez said. “You understand it. We were all kids once. I saw many rappers, boxers [from Puerto Rico] who went through it. I got excited about it. … But it’s a privilege to be as close to people as we are. A lot of people didn’t have that in the past.”
With a better understanding of how to handle the outside noise, Baez’s next step was falling in love with the game again and prior to the shortened regular season in 2020, he felt he did that despite his struggles.
But going into the final season before impending free agency, Baez feels comfortable with who he is and is ready to get back to being the player millions of people fell in love with when he burst onto the scene.
“I think you need to struggle sometimes,” Baez said. “Obviously, not a lot, but you need to fail to get better. You got to make adjustments. As soon as I get in the shower after the game, I turn the page and come back the next day ready to learn something and be better.
“I do feel more focused this spring. I’m not taking much from last year, because this is a different year, a different situation.”
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is siding with a New Mexico woman who was shot by police as she drove away from them, in a case that will allow more excessive force lawsuits against police to go forward.
The justices ruled 5-3 on Thursday that Roxanne Torres’ suit could continue because she had been “seized” by police when she was shot, even though she fled. The five justices in the majority included the court’s three liberals and two of its conservative members.
“The question in this case is whether a seizure occurs when an officer shoots someone who temporarily eludes capture after the shooting. The answer is yes: The application of physical force to the body of a person with intent to restrain is a seizure, even if the force does not succeed in subduing the person,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in an 18-page opinion for himself, conservative Brett Kavanaugh and liberals Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The decision does not end the case. Roberts wrote that the “Fourth Amendment does not forbid all or even most seizures — only unreasonable ones.” Lower courts will have to weigh in on the “reasonableness of the seizure, the damages caused by the seizure, and the officers’ entitlement to qualified immunity,” which could also end the case in the officers’ favor.
When the case was argued in October, the Trump administration had urged the justices to side with Torres and send the case back to lower courts.
Torres was shot in 2014 when four members of the New Mexico State Police arrived at her Albuquerque apartment with an arrest warrant for someone else. Torres was in her car with the engine running when officers attempted to speak with her. But Torres, who was experiencing a methamphetamine withdrawal, did not notice them until she said one tried to open her car door. Thinking the officers were carjackers, Torres hit the gas. Two of the officers fired their weapons 13 times as she drove off. She was hit twice in the back.
Torres pleaded no contest to aggravated fleeing from a law enforcement officer and assault on a peace officer. She also pleaded no contest to unlawfully taking a different motor vehicle, which she took after she fled and used to drive to a hospital 75 miles away.
Torres sued officers. She claimed they used excessive force, making the shooting an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment. A lower court ruled for officers and dismissed the case; an appeals court agreed. The Supreme Court’s decision now lets the suit move forward.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
“The majority holds that a criminal suspect can be simultaneously seized and roaming at large. On the majority’s account, a Fourth Amendment ‘seizure’ takes place whenever an officer ‘merely touches’ a suspect. It’s a seizure even if the suspect refuses to stop, evades capture, and rides off into the sunset never to be seen again. That view is as mistaken as it is novel,” Gorsuch wrote in a 26-page dissent.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett had not yet joined the court when the case was heard on Oct. 14 and did not participate in the decision.
Hours after the Bulls agreed to acquire big man Mo Wagner as part of a deal with the Wizards, the trade has been expanded to three teams with Wagner and Luke Kornet heading to the Celtics in exchange for center Daniel Theis, according to ESPN and NBC Sports Chicago.
It’s the latest move of the day for President of Basketball Operations Arturas Karnisovas, who made his big splash in the morning by acquiring two-time All-Star Nikola Vucevic from the Magic.
Theis, who turns 29 on April 4, gives the team another option for its remodeled frontcourt highlighted by Vucevic. The German big man averaged 9.5 points and 5.2 rebounds in 42 games (including 37 starts) with the Celtics this season.
Wagner, a 2018 first-round pick, never got a chance to suit up in Chicago. Under the expanded three-team trade, the Bulls are hanging onto Theis and Troy Brown while sending Daniel Gafford and Chandler Hutchison to Washington and Wagner and Luke Kornet to Boston.
The Bulls kept their trade deadline dealings going Thursday by sending forward Chandler Hutchison and big man Daniel Gafford to the Wizards, ESPN reports.
What was originally a two-team swap between the Bulls and Wizards emerged as a three-teamer with the Celtics jumping in before the trade deadline, according to NBC Sports Chicago.
At the core of the deal, the Bulls will reportedly walk away with guard Troy Brown and big man Daniel Theis while the Wizards get Hutchison and Gafford and the Celtics receive Mo Wagner and Luke Kornet,
Hutchison, the 22nd overall pick in the 2018 NBA Draft, missed time this season while dealing with a lower leg injury. He’s also repeatedly not played as a coach’s decision, failing to earn a spot in Billy Donovan’s rotation. In 79 games with the Bulls over three seasons, Hutchison averaged 5.8 points and four rebounds per game.
Gafford, a 2019 second-round pick, has averaged 4.7 points and 3.3 rebounds per game in his second NBA season.
The Bulls will hope to get more from Theis, a talented center, and Brown, the 15th overall pick in 2018, who averaged 10.4 points per game for the Wizards last season.
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