Columbus Blue Jackets goaltender Matiss Kivlenieks died of chest trauma from an errant fireworks mortar blast in what authorities described Monday as a tragic accident on the Fourth of July.
Police in Novi, Michigan, said the firework tilted slightly and started to fire toward people nearby Sunday night. The 24-year-old Kivlenieks was in a hot tub and tried to get clear with several other people, police Lt. Jason Meier said. Authorities earlier said the Lativan had died of an apparent head injury during a fall, but an autopsy clarified the cause of death.
The fire department and EMTs got to the private home shortly after 10 p.m. and took Kivlenieks to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Meier said. The Oakland County Medical Examiner’s office reported preliminary autopsy results Monday afternoon.
Prior to the autopsy, police said Kivlenieks was believed to have slipped and hit his head on concrete while running from a malfunctioning firework.
“At the moment, we’re pretty certain this was a tragic accident,” Meier said.
Columbus general manager Jarmo Kekalainen tweeted: “Life is so precious and can be so fragile. Hug your loved ones today. RIP Matiss, you will be dearly missed.” Blue Jackets president of hockey operations John Davidson called it a “devastating time” for the team.
“Kivi was an outstanding young man who greeted every day and everyone with a smile and the impact he had during his four years with our organization will not be forgotten,” he said.
Kivlenieks’ death came on the eve of Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final in Montreal, where the Tampa Bay Lightning had a chance to clinch the championship against the Canadiens on Monday night. Bell Centre held a moment of silence for Kivlenieks prior to the national anthems.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said Kivlenieks’ “love for life and passion for the game will be deeply missed by all those who have been fortunate to have him as a teammate and a friend.”
The Latvian Hockey Federation called Kivlenieks’ death “a great loss not only for Latvian hockey but for the entire Latvian nation.”
Kivlenieks most recently represented Latvia this spring at the world hockey championship in which he played four games. He played two games for the Blue Jackets and eight for the American Hockey League’s Cleveland Monsters this past season.
A native of Riga, Latvia, Kivlenieks signed with the Blue Jackets as a free agent in May 2017 and played eight games for the club overall. He was seen as a possible No. 2 goaltender next season if Joonas Korpisalo or Elvis Merzlikins is traded.
Kivlenieks was at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in Lexington last Tuesday as a guest of IndyCar driver Alexander Rossi.
Rossi announced that day he was going to race the Baja 1000 in Mexico in November, and Kivlenieks took a ride around Mid-Ohio in a Honda Ridgeline to help promote both Rossi and Sunday’s IndyCar race.
“This hits hard,” Rossi tweeted. “Prayers to the family and the team.”
How the events of Sunday night unfolded came into focus Monday as Meier said the autopsy findings prompted officers to re-interview some witnesses. He said police will continue trying to interview as many people as they can who were present at the time.
“We’re starting to put together a pretty good picture of what occurred,” he said.
Meier said police who responded to the emergency calls said there was a “large gathering” at the home but he didn’t have an estimate of how many people were there or how many people police want to speak with.
Meier would not provide the address of the property in Novi, a northern suburb of Detroit. A police report hasn’t yet been completed.
“What a tragic loss for all of us who knew him and I am thinking and praying for his family,” former Blue Jackets captain Nick Foligno tweeted. “Heaven gained a darn good goalie and better person… Just, way too soon.”
Former Columbus defenseman David Savard learned of the accident from Foligno.
“That was a brutal wakeup this morning,” Savard said in French. “That was a good kid with a lot of talent who was going to be a part of the team next year or in the future. That’s extremely sad.”
Tonight’s Chicago edition of Public Affairs celebrates our nation’s 246th birthday, featuring guest Steve Boulton, Chair, Chicago Republican Party discussing with show host Berkowitz how best to insure fair and honest democratic elections
The show airs in the City of Chicago at 8:30 pm and midnight on Cable Ch. 21 (CAN TV).
The Berkowitz- Boulton discussion was taped just two days before the U. S. Supreme Court issued a ruling on Thursday of this week supporting the Arizona election law that significantly curtails ballot harvesting and requires votes cast outside of the voter’s precinct to be discarded.
Tonight’s show discussion should give viewers some perspective to understand and assess the Supreme Court’s opinion.
Election laws have recently been changed in other states, including Georgia and Florida, and as in Arizona, some argue those election laws are designed to discourage minority voting, are discriminatory against minorities and violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Others, including the majorities in the legislatures in those states disagree and argue the laws are designed to prevent fraud and insure ballot integrity and security.
The Department of Justice 10 days ago filed a lawsuit against Georgia arguing on similar grounds to those argued by the Democratic Party in the lawsuit involving Arizona that the new Georgia election law violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Georgia will of course argue it’s law was constitutional and not illegal, in part because Georgia has a compelling need to prohibit voter fraud and moreover, the law had neither a racially discriminatory intent nor effect, all of which the Supreme Court found in it’s decision this past week holding the Arizona law constitutional .
We explore the above and other issues with attorney Boulton, an expert in voting laws and regulations, and provide a foundation for understanding some of the likely benign motivations of the Georgia legislators- even though our show was taped two days before the Supreme Court handed down it’s decision in the Arizona case.
The show also airs this week on cable in:
— Chicago tomorrow night at 9:41 pm on Cable Ch 21 (CAN TV)
Whenever Fidaa Elaydi buys fresh falafel for $3.99 a dozen from a bakery in Palos Hills, she gives her three children a lesson on Palestinian cuisine.
Elaydi recalls how her father gets nostalgic every time he eats Jerusalem sesame bread because it reminds him of his own childhood, when he would sell loaves of that bread while living in the Gaza Strip.
“I try and make those parts that weren’t accessible to my parents in the refugee camp accessible to my kids here, while at the same time helping them understand the nuance,” said Elaydi, 33, a third-generation Palestinian refugee and an immigration attorney who lives in southwest suburban Justice.
When talking to them about their Palestinian identity, she focuses on the beauty of the area her parents would tell her stories about when she was growing up — Jaffa’s oranges, the vastness of the Mediterranean Sea and eating figs and pomegranates right off the trees.
“I just try to link everything back … to strengthen their connection to their homeland in that way,” she added.
Fidaa Elaydi with her daughter at one of the recent pro-Palestine protests in Chicago.Courtesy photo
That continued connection to their homeland was on full display recently, when hundreds took to the streets in the Loop to show support for Palestinians in their conflict with Israel.
The Arab America website estimates 85,000 Palestinians live in greater Chicago, making up 60% of Chicago’s Arab population.
The community is scattered across the metropolitan area, but Arabic street signs are so commonplace in some southwest suburbs — around Bridgeview, Oak Lawn and Worth — that the area has been called “Little Palestine.”
“Palestinians sort of settled in this area, and they chose to stay near each other and build this close-knit community. If you’re driving down South Harlem, you’ll see bakeries, dessert shops, jewelry stores and small grocery stores — everything citing the names of the cities of Palestine,” Elaydi said.
The Arab American Action Network, a nonprofit community center established in 1995 on the Southwest Side, is one of many hubs for the community. Social services, advocacy work, education, women and youth engagement, and cultural events are among the services and outreach programs the network offers.
That community is bound by a history of conflict and displacement. The region Palestinians call home includes much of present-day Israel. Palestinian Americans living in Chicago are just one piece of a larger network of Palestinians living in the U.S. and around the world who connect to their struggle through storytelling, activism, social justice and sometimes just by existing.
All four of Elaydi’s grandparents were forced to leave their homes in 1948, a date known to some as Israel’s war of independence but to others as the “Nakba,” Arabic for catastrophe.
They ended up in a refugee camp in Gaza, where Elaydi’s parents grew up until her father, accompanied by her mother, moved to the United States as a student.
“Because the Palestinian story is inherently a story of dispossession and displacement and exile, I have never believed that my connection, or my Palestinian identity, was any less than a Palestinian living between the [Jordan] River and the [Mediterranean] Sea,” she said.
Ahlam Jbara immigrated to Chicago in 1974 when she was two months old. She moved back to the West Bank with her family in 1986. But the next year, six months after the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, her family moved back to Chicago.
“I always say the two years that I lived there shaped who I am today,” said Jbara, 47.
Ahlam Jbara speaks at a Nakba Day event hosted by the Palestinian American Center in Oak Lawn in 2019.Provided
That 73-year-long conflict continues today and flared anew earlier this year in Jerusalem, where Palestinians were faced with heavy-handed Israeli police tactics at Al-Aqsa Mosque during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in April.
This, combined with the threatened evictions of dozens of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem by Jewish settlers, was followed by the group Hamas sending long-range rockets toward Jerusalem and Israel launching heavy airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.
At least 230 Palestinians were killed, including 65 children and 39 women, with 1,710 people wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Twelve people in Israel, including a 5-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl, were killed.
The 11-day outburst of violence ended May 20, with a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
During the conflict, Palestinian Americans and their supporters took to the streets in Chicago and around the world.
The community’s sense of connection here reflects decades of organizing and institution-building, said Hatem Abudayyeh, the Arab American Action Network’s executive director.
Abudayyeh, the son of Palestinian immigrants, is also national chairperson of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network — a grassroots group that also is part of the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine, an umbrella organization for pro-Palestine groups in the area, including American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine.
“We were positioned to be able to respond the way we did with masses of people because we have institutions. Because we’ve established a tradition and a history of community organizing in the city and in the United States as a whole for a long, long time,” Abudayyeh said.
The coalition-organized rallies shut down parts of the Loop while marchers demonstrated outside the Israeli consulate, waving Palestinian flags.
Aviv Ezra, consul general of Israel to the Midwest, said the latest situation was not about the situation in Sheikh Jarrah, but rather about the actions of Hamas, which he said has “used every pretext … to wage violence against and eliminate the state of Israel.”
Demonstrators hold up a banner for the Coalition for Justice in Palestine during a march through the Loop, May 12, 2021. The coalition is an umbrella organization for a number of Chicago-chapter pro-Palestine groups.Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times
In mid-June the ceasefire was tested when hundreds of Israeli ultranationalists, some chanting “Death to Arabs,” marched through east Jerusalem to celebrate Israel’s capture of the area in 1967. Palestinians then sent fire-carrying balloons into southern Israel, causing several blazes in parched farmland. Israel carried out airstrikes, and more balloons followed.
About a week after that, there were confrontations between Palestinians and Jewish settlers in a Jerusalem neighborhood where settler groups are trying to evict several Palestinian families, officials said last week.
Thousands protest in support of Palestine and march through the Loop, May 12, 2021.Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times
Growing awareness of systemic racism in the United States casts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a different light for some Americans, says Wendy Pearlman, a political science professor at Northwestern University.
“That language of rights and equality also draws the connections to Black Lives Matter and social justice protests in ways that, at least in the American context, people are beginning to see in a new light that puts human rights in the forefront and that is difficult for Israel and its allies to delegitimize,” she added.
Tarek Khalil, a member of American Muslims for Palestine’s Chicago chapter, said the rallies are “outcries for justice, liberation and equality.”
“Me being an activist here is absolutely worthwhile, because the government that represents me is the same government that is providing the same entity that is the source of my people’s oppression — $3.8 billion a year in financial, weapons and diplomatic aid,” said Khalil, 36, who grew up in Chicago and lives in Bridgeview but spent four years of his childhood living in East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood.
“It’s personal but also political,” Khalil said. “It’s essential that we pressure our government to formulate policies that are not antithetical to the values that we preach about every single day.”
The affable 20-year-old University of Chicago junior had the option to work from home for the competitive internship he’d landed at a Loop investment firm, but he “loved getting to know as many people as he could,” according to his best friend.
“He loved the grind,” Zach Cogan said of his classmate and fraternity brother.
Lewis was commuting home during rush hour Thursday when a bullet pierced the window of his train at the 51st Street Green Line station and entered his neck. He died at a hospital Sunday morning.
Police say he wasn’t the intended target. Investigators have yet to provide a possible description of the shooter. It’s not even clear which direction the gunfire came from.
“It’s a senseless tragedy for so many reasons,” Cogan said.
Friends of Lewis remembered him as a gregarious jokester, a hyper-focused student, an avid runner and a car guy — one who went out of his way to make people feel welcome.
“He was so incredibly caring, loyal and genuine,” said Cogan, who met Lewis on their first day at the prestigious Hyde Park campus and roomed with him at Alpha Epsilon Pi, the Jewish fraternity of which Lewis was president. “He loved working hard for other people because he was so damn selfless. And he never wanted people to thank him for what he did.”
Max Lewis, pictured in 2019.Provided by Kent Denver School.
The Denver-area native was studying economics and computer science. He graduated in 2019 from the Kent Denver School, a prestigious private school. His 12th grade physics teacher, Dr. Rand Harrington, said in an email “he grew into an exceptional scholar full of good humor, curiosity, drive and a deep passion for technology.”
At the U. of C., Lewis was a leader of Promontory Investment Research, a student group that helps interested undergrads produce and write research reports — a field Lewis was passionate about, his friend Victoria Gin said.
“He was a ball of light,” Gin said, especially in the early dark days of COVID-19, when the group’s meetings were all virtual. “Max would bring his energy like he was in person. He would give 120%, and you felt that through the screen.”
When he wasn’t busy somewhere on campus, he’d be touching base with friends during hour-long phone calls, or while tagging along for a trip to the grocery store.
“He was like this butterfly,” Cogan said.
Max Lewis, a University of Chicago junior, died Sunday after begin shot on a Green Line train on the South Side.Provided
Lewis also loved talking cars, especially the one he coveted most: the Porsche 911. “But anything that had a stick, he’d drive it, just because he could,” Cogan said.
Only a few weeks before the shooting, Lewis had started interning for Segall Bryant & Hamill, according to his LinkedIn profile. A spokesperson for the firm couldn’t be reached.
And he’d already been looking forward to a big internship he’d just landed for next summer, according to Gin. “My latest conversations with him were so optimistic,” she said.
In a message to students and faculty, U. of C. officials said, “the University is devastated by Max’s loss. During this sorrowful time, our deepest sympathies are with Max’s family, friends, and all who knew him. Max was a talented student and beloved campus leader and friend who will be greatly missed.”
Lewis is survived by his parents and younger brother.
His fraternity launched an online campaign to help cover members’ travel costs to funeral services in Denver. Remaining proceeds will go to the Rivkin Foundation, which funds ovarian cancer research, as well as a to-be-determined anti-gun violence group, Cogan said.
“This happens all the time in Chicago,” Cogan said. “It needs to end.”
The teen was on the sidewalk Monday when a dark-colored vehicle drove by and and someone from inside pulled out a gun and fired shots in the 6600 block of South Langley Avenue, police said.
The Fourth of July party that filled the 100 block of North Long Avenue had kicked off in the afternoon, and the air was filled with barbecue smoke and the sounds of fireworks and children squealing as they tossed water-balloon.
But the festive vibe ended not long after midnight, with a dozen squad cars clearing the street, and a police commander known for warm relations with the West Side community limping from a gunshot wound to the foot.
Patrina Wines — who’s been with the Chicago Police Department for 28 years and took over as commander of the 15th District a little over a year ago — and a police sergeant were wounded by bullets sprayed by a man who fired into a crowd of revelers around 1:30 a.m. Monday, according to the police.
Wines was hit in the foot, and the sergeant suffered a graze wound to the leg. Both were treated for their wounds, but neither required hospitalization, a police spokesman said.
The officers were standing among dozens of neighborhood residents when they were hit, according to Marshawn Feltus, a longtime resident of the block who said he saw what happened.
“There was no mistaking that they were shooting at police, and probably 50 people on the street,” Feltus said. ” The brazenness or stupidity that went into it, that’s what I don’t understand. There were police cars out with lights flashing.”
Tuesday, a group of about a dozen neighborhood residents congregated in the 90-degree heat of the street, a few houses down from the shooting scene. A woman, who did not want to give her name, said she had been standing next to Wines, arguing with the police commander, when Wines’ leg crumpled and she fell to the ground. The woman heard air escaping from a punctured tire, and looked down the street a few dozen yards and saw the gunman.
“I yelled to the cops ‘There he is! Shoot him!’ And they didn’t shoot,” the woman said. “They didn’t chase him, neither and he wasn’t half a block away. That’s why they don’t catch none of these shooters.”
A street sign marks the 100 block of North Long, where police Commander Patrina Wines and another officer was shot as police dispersed a crowd gathered for a Fourth of July block party. Wines was struck in the foot as she talked with residents on the street. Andy Grimm/Sun-Times
Not long before the shooting, a dozen or more officers had arrived to disperse the crowd. The gathering breaking up largely peacefully when a man emerged across the street from where Wines and several other officers were talking with people, according to Feltus. The man raised a gun and fired several shots, then took off, Feltus said.
“I wouldn’t say he even ran off,” he said. “He just kind of galloped.”
Amid the noise from fireworks going off on neighboring streets, only a handful of people closest to the gunman seemed to immediately notice someone was shooting, Feltus said.
“The reaction was almost slow except for the people that was right there to see they were shooting,” he said. “The people right there called out, and you could just see people moving like a wave as they realized it was shots.”
Police Supt. David Brown said both officers will be “all right.”
“As you know, there’s been a lot of large crowd gatherings tonight, a lot of celebratory fireworks going off, kind of spontaneous,” Brown said at a news conference. “They were dispersing a crowd when they heard shots and felt pain.”
Brown said it wasn’t clear whether the officer were targeted, “or whether this was people celebrating shooting in the air, shooting indiscriminately.”
Another witness, who asked not to be named, said that people had gathered throughout the day and were launching fireworks in the street around 1 a.m., when several squad cars arrived.
Wines and several other officers were talking cordially with residents when they were shot.
“That’s not unlike her,” said Feltus, who works as a crime victim’s advocate and is active in Austin. “She’s going to come out to the scene and tell people to party safely.”
When Wines took over as commander in August 2020, the South Side native was praised for her dedication to community policing when she was introduced at a community meeting by Deputy Chief Ernest Cato, according to an article by Austin Weekly. Wines said she considered community policing — emphasizing strong ties between the police and each community — a “calling.”
The teen was on the sidewalk Monday when a dark-colored vehicle drove by and and someone from inside pulled out a gun and fired shots in the 6600 block of South Langley Avenue, police said.
The Fourth of July party that filled the 100 block of North Long Avenue had kicked off in the afternoon, and the air was filled with barbecue smoke and the sounds of fireworks and children squealing as they tossed water-balloon.
But the festive vibe ended not long after midnight, with a dozen squad cars clearing the street, and a police commander known for warm relations with the West Side community limping from a gunshot wound to the foot.
Patrina Wines — who’s been with the Chicago Police Department for 28 years and took over as commander of the 15th District a little over a year ago — and a police sergeant were wounded by bullets sprayed by a man who fired into a crowd of revelers around 1:30 a.m. Monday, according to the police.
Wines was hit in the foot, and the sergeant suffered a graze wound to the leg. Both were treated for their wounds, but neither required hospitalization, a police spokesman said.
The officers were standing among dozens of neighborhood residents when they were hit, according to Marshawn Feltus, a longtime resident of the block who said he saw what happened.
“There was no mistaking that they were shooting at police, and probably 50 people on the street,” Feltus said. ” The brazenness or stupidity that went into it, that’s what I don’t understand. There were police cars out with lights flashing.”
Not long before the shooting, a dozen or more officers had arrived to disperse the crowd. The crowd was breaking up peacefully when a man emerged across the street from where Wines and several other officers were talking with people, according to Feltus. The man raised a gun and fired several shots, then took off, Feltus said.
“I wouldn’t say he even ran off,” he said. “He just kind of galloped.”
Amid the noise from fireworks going off on neighboring streets, only a handful of people closest to the gunman seemed to immediately notice someone was shooting, Feltus said.
“The reaction was almost slow except for the people that was right there to see they were shooting,” he said. “The people right there called out, and you could just see people moving like a wave as they realized it was shots.”
Police Supt. David Brown said both officers will be “all right.”
“As you know, there’s been a lot of large crowd gatherings tonight, a lot of celebratory fireworks going off, kind of spontaneous,” Brown said at a news conference. “They were dispersing a crowd when they heard shots and felt pain.”
Brown said it wasn’t clear whether the officer were targeted, “or whether this was people celebrating shooting in the air, shooting indiscriminately.”
Another witness, who asked not to be named, said that people had gathered throughout the day and were launching fireworks in the street around 1 a.m., when several squad cars arrived.
Wines and several other officers were talking cordially with residents when they were shot.
“That’s not unlike her,” said Feltus, who works as a crime victim’s advocate and is active in Austin. “She’s going to come out to the scene and tell people to party safely.”
When Wines took over as commander in August 2020, the South Side native was praised for her dedication to community policing when she was introduced at a community meeting by Deputy Chief Ernest Cato, according to an article by Austin Weekly. Wines said she considered community policing — emphasizing strong ties between the police and each community — a “calling.”
The note sat on the back of Tracey Bradley’s couch when she returned home from work late that morning.
Written by her 10-year-old daughter, Tionda, the note said she and Diamond, her 3-year-old sister, had run by the store and to a park on Chicago’s South Side.
But something was off about the note: Everything — the spelling, the grammar — was too perfect for a girl attending summer school to improve her reading and writing.
It was also unlike Tionda to leave a note. Even if the girls had left the apartment, Tionda would have called her mom’s cell phone.
The Bradley sisters were gone.
Twenty years ago this summer, Chicago launched what investigators say may be the city’s largest missing persons investigation to date.
The police superintendent ordered the city turned upside-down to find them. Over the course of months, nearly every abandoned building in Chicago — some 5,300 of them — was mapped and searched. Sewers, dumpsters, forests, lakes and rivers were dredged and scoured. More than 100 sex offenders were interviewed. And about 42 tons of garbage was picked over by law enforcement, including new police recruits.
Everyone was on duty.
In the hunt for the girls, leads took investigators and journalists across the country, even to Morocco, chasing possible sightings, psychics’ visions and fraud, with enough tips to fill 25 filing cabinets. But as the time stretched to weeks, months and years, no sign of the girls has ever turned up.
It was an odd case to catch the city’s attention. Two young Black girls had gone missing from a high crime and impoverished area of Chicago.
Tracey Bradley, the mother of Diamond and Tionda Bradley, holds balloons during a gathering on July 6, 2020, to commemorate the 19th year that the Bradley family has been looking for Diamond and Tionda.Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times
Often when young Black children are missing, authorities write them off as runaways, and their cases are unlikely to grab high-profile investigator and media attention, according to investigators and missing persons experts and organizations. So when the Chicago Police initially labeled the Bradley girls’ case as “missing” — not abducted — the family was irate. The case was immediately reclassified as “missing/endangered,” as it remains now.
“I didn’t want the community to overlook it like, ‘Oh, it’s two kids who ran away,'” Shelia Bradley-Smith, the girls’ great-aunt, told USA TODAY. “No, these kids were taken.”
Black children, then as now, are reported missing more often than children of other races. More than 300,000 juveniles are reported missing in the U.S. every year, and while Census Bureau data suggests Black kids make up just 16% of the population under 18, more than 36% of missing juveniles in 2020 were Black, the latest FBI data shows.
For the Bradley sisters, pressure from family members, along with the girls’ ages, changed the narrative. What could have been a short mention on the evening news was soon leading the front pages of city papers and making national news and crime shows.
With each airing of the story, more tips would come in. Some leads seemed promising. Some still do. But no arrests have ever been made and no charges have ever been brought in the case.
The investigation into the girls’ vanishing seemed to move quickly at the start, zeroing in on a man close to the family who gave detectives reasons to suspect him. But the case against him is too circumstantial and the probe remains with the cold case and homicide unit in the same headquarters where it began.
Still, two decades later, a family and a city ask: Where are they?
USA TODAY interviewed a dozen people familiar with details of the case, including detectives, officers and other law enforcement officials who previously worked — or are now working — the investigation. Many sources, fearing for their safety or their careers, asked not to be named in the story.
When the girls went missing on July 6, 2001, Tionda and Diamond were living with their mother and two sisters — Victoria, then 9, and Rita, 12 — in the multi-building Lake Grove Village Apartments complex in the Oakland neighborhood on the South Side. The girls’ school, a handful of parks and Lake Michigan were all within a few blocks.
Tracey Bradley, their mother, is the eldest of nine siblings, and dozens of family members lived in the area, near what was once the largest stretch of public housing in the United States: the Robert Taylor Homes. The project was later demolished, and new residential and commercial structures took its place.
Because of their proximity to one another, the family took turns caring for one another’s kids. Tionda and Diamond primarily split their time between their mom’s place and their grandmother’s apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes.
One of their aunts, April Jackson, would bring them to work with her at Robert Taylor Park, where they took dance and gymnastics classes along with their cousins and other kids from the community.
Tionda wanted nothing more than to become a dancer. Helpful, smart, responsible and a little sassy, she was “like little mama caretaker” to Diamond, Bradley-Smith said.
Diamond, meanwhile, was “a quiet, humble little girl who always had a sweet little smile,” said Faith Bradley-Cathery, the girls’ aunt. Victoria, their sister, recalled how Diamond used to curl up under their mother at home or jump from couch to couch.
The day the girls disappeared, they had planned to go on a camping trip to Lake Shafer in Indiana with their mother and her boyfriend, according to family and investigators. Victoria and Rita weren’t going on the trip and had been dropped off at their grandmother’s place the evening before.
Tracey says she left early that morning for work and returned around 11:30 a.m. to find Tionda and Diamond gone. Before calling police around 6 p.m., Tracey borrowed $20 from a neighbor so she could buy food at the nearby Jewel store. A receipt from the store is stamped 12:21 p.m. Then, she searched the neighborhood, and called family, friends, the school and other places where the kids could have been.
Security cameras at the entrance of the apartment complex didn’t catch anything: The cameras had been pushed upward, according to the family’s private investigator, who goes by the name P Foster and has been working the case pro bono for 20 years. He said some residents may have wanted to hide criminal activity.
Foster does not provide his full name for fear of his family’s safety.
The night before the girls went missing, they were seen by many people. The sisters were at the apartment when Tracey had two friends over to drink and watch the Cubs baseball game. The friends were questioned twice, and they both said the girls were at the home when they left around 10 p.m.
There are also reports that a neighbor in their building came by after the friends left, but that he never went past the front of the apartment and never saw the girls, according to police.
Tracey’s boyfriend came to the apartment around 3 a.m., stayed for a bit, then took Tracey to work around 6:30 a.m., according to investigators.Tionda and Diamond were left alone, with strict orders from their mother not to let anyone — no matter who they were — into the apartment.
Classmates said they saw Tionda and Diamond at the nearby Doolittle Elementary School playground that morning, according to family, who believe the girls slipped out that morning but returned home once the other children headed in for the start of summer school.
According to family, Tionda left a voicemail on her mother’s cellphone around 8:17 a.m., asking if she had permission to let a man in. Tionda used a first name in the message that both Tracey’s boyfriend and the neighbor shared. The girls, however, regularly called the neighbor by a nickname instead.
The boyfriend confirmed to USA TODAY he took Tracey to work that morning but denied showing up at the apartment later when the girls allegedly called their mom to say someone was at the door.
Family allege Chicago police accidentally deleted the voicemail off the cellphone when they brought it down to the station. Law enforcement sources say they’ve never heard it and could not confirm that an officer deleted the message.
Relatives say family, friends and law enforcement came in and out of the apartment before investigators cleared the space to take fingerprints and gather other evidence several days after the girls were gone.
“It wasn’t taped off at all,” the girl’s great aunt, Bradley-Smith said. “That, to me, was a valuable mistake.”
Police investigators familiar with the case could not confirm that the scene was not cleared and searched earlier.
Initially, investigators honed in on Tracey Bradley’s boyfriend at the time, who was close to the girls.
That day, July 6, police took Tracey and her boyfriend in for about 22 hours of separate questioning. They both took lie-detector tests and passed, police sources say.Foster, the family’s detective, said the boyfriend’s test was inconclusive.
Tracey and her boyfriend quickly got lawyers, closing opportunities for investigators to talk openly with them. But police and the FBI still remain in periodic touch with both.
USA TODAY is not naming the man because he has not been charged in the case. Tracey Bradley has not returned calls from USA TODAY.
Several pieces of evidence have pointed investigators in the boyfriend’s direction. For one, investigators found hair matching Tionda and Tracey’s DNA in his vehicle’s trunk. He told police he would sneak the girls into drive-ins in the city, although investigators said the closest drive-ins at the time were in the suburbs.
The boyfriend has offered law enforcement conflicting stories about his actions on the day the girls went missing. Four teenagers and three neighbors said they saw him setting fire to something in a 55-gallon drum in his backyard garage, about 10 miles south of the girls’ home, then putting the barrel into his trunk and driving away, according to sources.
The man, who worked as a machinist and welder, claimed he never burned anything in the drum — or even had a drum, according to police. But he did say he was doing refurbishments on his home and that he dumped debris in garbage containers in Chicago’s Washington Park. Police searched the South Side park but found nothing.
Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times
Family pressed prosecutors under then-Cook County State’s Attorneys Richard Devine and Anita Alvarez to charge the boyfriend, but the circumstantial evidence was simply not enough at the time to go further, according to two sources involved in the investigation.
In an interview with USA TODAY in June, the boyfriend denied any involvement with the girls being missing or that he ever took a DNA test to see if he fathered one of Tracey’s children. He claimed he tried to help investigators find them at the beginning.
“I don’t know who did anything; I just know that I had nothing to do with it,” he said of the girls’ disappearance.
The man, who is now 50, said he gave investigators his pictures and videotapes of the girls and surrendered the keys to his car and house. In the garage, he and sources said, investigators found recently purchased rubber gloves, contractor trash bags and bleach from Home Depot that investigators think could have been a way of cleaning up after the girls went missing. Police have the receipt for the purchase.
“That was 20 years ago, and everyone tried to blame me,” he said, adding that “all three of them” — the family, investigators and the media — ganged up on him because they couldn’t solve it.
The family and investigators have also had other suspects.
A man who is a registered sex offender and spent time around the girls later dedicated a book to them, Bradley-Smith says. Some family members say Tracey gave $5 to a relative that day to go watch the girls at the apartment. Others allege the neighbor who the girls had a nickname for once suggested something bad would happen to them if Tracey kept leaving them alone.
And then there’s the theory a Moroccan man, rumored to be Tionda’s father, had something to do with it. According to family, the children who reported seeing the girls on the playground that morning also said they saw a fair-skinned man in a trench coat approach the girls and speak briefly with Tionda. The tip led a local reporter to travel to Morocco to search for the girls, to no avail.
The family also has suspicions about the note Tionda wrote.
According to forensic tests by the FBI in 2001, Tionda did indeed write the note found on the couch, and not under duress. That’s why the family believes Tionda was coached by someone she trusted in writing the note.
“Her writing a full letter with correct grammar? It’s not appropriate for her,” said Jackson, the girls’ aunt. “I’m quite sure whoever took them, she was very comfortable with them.”
Bradley-Smith said she’s hoping the new state’s attorney, Kim Foxx, will revisit the case and bring charges.
A spokesperson for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office sent an email to USA TODAY in late June saying it has not been asked to review criminal charges related to the girls’ disappearance but was “open to reviewing any information that is brought to us by law enforcement.”
While police said they never asked the office to bring charges, the office was kept regularly apprised of developments.
The Chicago Police Department, which remains the lead agency in the Bradley sisters’ missing persons case, declined official interviews through the head of the department’s News Affairs, saying the investigation remains open and there are no new leads.
But as recently as Wednesday, a source told USA TODAY the FBI office in Chicago is coordinating with out-of-state authorities about a new tip.
July 6 marks 20 years since Tionda and Diamond disappeared. In those two decades, the number of detectives working the case has dropped from more than 100 to one person working it part time as he handles other cases. Three of the five lead detectives on the case have died.
But many in this city never forgot. The family — who held vigils for the first 40 nights after the girls went missing — now holds an annual one.
A former police detective started writing a book about the case as a sort of therapy to deal with the lack of answers. “There’s very few cases in my career when I didn’t know who did it,” he said. “It was the most frustrating thing I worked on in my life.”
Foster, the private detective, said he’s spoken to a family member every day since soon after the girls went missing. He becomes emotional when talking about the case. “I am so dedicated to the cause, if it takes my grandchildren’s children to find out what happened to Diamond and Tionda, I’m willing to put that at stake,” Foster said.
The two decades of searching has worn on members of the large family and, at times, caused rifts.
Faith Bradley-Cathery, the girls’ aunt and now the mother of four adult children, became so paranoid that she had her landlord put up a 7-foot fence around her property when her children were young.
April Jackson, another of the girls’ aunts, partners with schools to host safety assemblies and help kids craft personalized ID cards. She worked with Walmart to put up a missing children board in each of its stores nationwide. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, she printed face masks with the sisters’ faces on them.
Victoria Bradley, the sister whose birthday is the day after the girls disappeared, said she hasn’t celebrated in 20 years. Her mother, Tracey, suffers from panic attacks and often calls her daughter crying, Victoria Bradley said.
Tracey Bradley has been described by multiple sources involved in the investigation as reserved and somewhat suspicious of police. She did talk with some detectives working the case, but sources say her prolonged questioning immediately following the girls’ disappearance forever made her less willing to cooperate with law enforcement.
Bradley-Smith, the girls’ great-aunt and now a missing persons advocate, has spearheaded most of the family’s efforts to raise awareness about the girls. She has lost several jobs and was temporarily homeless in part because of her quest to find the girls.
In 2015, she went looking for a missing Minnesota boy who disappeared three blocks from her home, 10-year-old Barway Collins, and helped find his body on the banks of the Mississippi River. “I did feel like, ‘God, why? Why you gonna let me find somebody else’s? What about ours?'” Bradley-Smith said.
Tens of thousands of dollars in reward money was offered at the time the girls went missing, and the FBI is still offering $10,000. Family set up several online and social media pages dedicated to the girls. Tips — and false hopes — poured in.
Psychics based in New York led the family to the site of animal bones. A MySpace photo that a world-renowned facial recognition expert determined was Tionda turned out not to be. A Dallas woman who claimed to be, at times, both of the girls, was a fraud.
As recently as eight months ago, Bradley-Smith got a tip about alleged bones buried in a backyard, and police and members of the nonprofit Community United Effort Center for Missing Persons went to the South Side to investigate.
“I’ve stressed and worried and searched and hoped and prayed and been disappointed,” Bradley-Smith said. “But all I can do is keep going.”
That Tionda and Diamond have remained an investigative — and media — focus over the last 20 years is due largely to the outspoken family members, who have kept pressure on law enforcement to find the girls, on prosecutors to consider or bring charges against suspects, and on the media to draw the spotlight to the case.
They’re fighting a decades-long uphill battle against a system that tends not to give missing Black children much attention, according to investigators and missing persons organizations.
Social scientists have long noted missing white children — particularly white girls — receive a disproportionate amount of news coverage compared to missing children of color.
Multiple studies in the past two decades have documented the so-called Missing White Woman Syndrome in online, print and television news outlets reaching national and regional audiences. Less news coverage can lead to a greater chance that young Black children are never found or recovered much later.
When a child of color is reported missing by their family members, they’re more likely to be classified as a runaway by law enforcement and receive little media coverage, said Natalie Wilson, co-founder of Maryland-based Black & Missing.
Children classified as a runaway also don’t receive Amber Alerts — messages with information about the missing child broadcasted on radio, displayed on television, sent as text alerts and more.
“Our children are adultified and they are not seen as children,” Wilson said. “We’re trying to change these narratives to say that these are valued individuals missing from our communities, our neighborhoods, and we need to find them.”
Frequently, Wilson said, Black families “feel as though law enforcement just believes that their child ran away, and we’re telling them, ‘You know what — you know your child better than anyone else. If this isn’t what they do, this isn’t characteristic of them, you need to speak up.'”
And the Bradley family spoke up. They knew the girls wouldn’t leave their large family — let alone venture out of the apartment to the store.
In mid-June, Bradley-Smith walked into the third-floor, three-bedroom apartment where the sisters lived, for the first time since July 2001. She traced her fingers along the walls as she walked from room to room, conjuring images of the old layout and pointing to where Tionda and Diamond used to sleep.
“It still feels like yesterday,” Bradley-Smith said after she got back into her car and looked up at the apartment through her window.
Twenty years later, she hopes time will be on her side.
“People talk. People get old. People go to jail. I’m just praying someone will come forward with the information,” Bradley-Smith said. “The world will know Tionda and Diamond Bradley by the time I’m done.”
The FBI asks anyone with information about the disappearance of Tionda and Diamond Bradley to contact Chicago Police Department detectives at 312-747-8380, your local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate. You can submit an anonymous tip online here. The family’s private detective can be reached at 847-579-9771.
In many cases, pessimists’ glass-half-empty outlook is actually an attempt to reject false hopes, given how often our species’ progress is encumbered by our tendency to (at best) shoot ourselves in the foot. There’s joy to be found in lowered expectations: Would you rather be disappointed by leaders and institutions that fall short of their lofty promise, or pleasantly surprised when they clear a low bar?
Even among pessimists, Detroit-born horror author Thomas Ligotti (also known for his musical collaborations with David Tibet and Current 93) skews bleak. In his 2010 nonfiction book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, he opines that our consciousness is the “parent of all horrors,” an evolutionary defect that has doomed us to a futile search for meaning while our survival hinges on the response to pain, the fear of death, and the instinct to procreate. Awareness of this absurdity pushes us to shut it out, trapping us on a proverbial hamster wheel where we busy ourselves with whatever will keep those thoughts away–religion, hedonism, even the distractions of art and music.
Rather than choose escapism, At the Gates use Ligotti’s dire ruminations as fuel on their new seventh album, The Nightmare of Being (Century Media). The legendary Gothenburg melodic death-metal band formed in 1990 and released four full-lengths, including 1995’s landmark Slaughter of the Soul, before parting ways in ’96. Nightmare is their third full-length since reuniting for 2014’s At War With Reality, and unsurprisingly (considering its inspiration) it delves into some of the darkest depths of their career.
Opener “Spectre of Extinction” uses a reverential instrumental intro to pull you into a world where humankind’s mutually agreed-upon demise is its only hope of liberation. The record has monolithic ragers to satisfy your death-metal cravings (“The Paradox,” “The Abstract Enthroned”), with varied dynamics and stylistic adventures that boost their power. The motorik chugging of “Cosmic Pessimism” underlines its message that despite our best attempts, our destiny is out of our control: “We do not live, we are lived,” sings front man Tomas Lindberg Redant. “Pessimism, the last refuge of hope.” The sleek, cinematic “Garden of Cyrus,” one of the album’s most unexpected twists, detours into prog territory with a majestic saxophone melody by Anders Gabrielsson that dances around somber spoken-word vocals.
The Nightmare of Being is multidimensional, revealing more on repeat listenings, and proves that At the Gates still have plenty to say and explore after three decades. For their fans, that can only be a good thing. If pain and death are the only certainties, then I want to distract myself with as much good music as possible. v
The Listener is a weekly sampling of music Reader staffers love. Absolutely anything goes, and you can reach us at [email protected].
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