The White Sox dominated Kansas City during a weekend sweep. The Twins come to town next. Can the boys keep it rolling against AL Central rivals? GGTB covers it all!
The post GGTB A Chicago White Sox Podcast; Episode 98 – Don’t Stop Now Boys! first appeared on CHI CITY SPORTS l Chicago Sports Blog – News – Forum – Fans – Rumors.Read More
The Chicago Bears have some incredible athletes on their current roster, but none can rival just how spectacular an athlete Seattle Seahawks wide receiver D.K. Metcalf is. Very few in the world can, in fact.
Chicago Bears: 3 players who could compete in 100 Meter Dashon May 10, 2021 at 1:00 pm Read More »
Chicago Cubs (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)
The Chicago Cubs just capped off a 5-1 homestand with a convincing sweep of the reigning World Series-champion Dodgers and taking two-of-three against the Pirates. Monday’s game between the Cubs and Dodgers was rained out, forcing a twin bill on Tuesday, in which Kyle Hendricks went the distance in Game 1.
Chicago Cubs: Top performers for week of May 3-9on May 10, 2021 at 11:00 am Read More »
The Chicago Bulls captured their third-straight win over the Detroit Pistons on Sunday night, 108-96.
There is a lot to discuss from this recent impressive win-streak. The Bulls have beaten the Boston Celtics, Charlotte Hornets, and now the Detroit Pistons in their last three games.
Chicago Bulls: Observations from win over the Detroit Pistonson May 10, 2021 at 12:00 pm Read More »
Chicago artist Nesbitt “Nez” Wesonga broke out in the early 2010s with hip-hop production crew Nez & Rio. By 2014, they’d helped make a bona fide hit album: Schoolboy Q’s Oxymoron features three Nez & Rio tracks, including the triumphant single “Man of the Year.” Q had previously enlisted the duo for 2012’s “Druggys Wit Hoes Again,” which contains flashes of Chicago house—and nearly a decade later, Nez is still finding ways to express his love of house music.…Read More
A 31-year-old man was fatally shot Friday in the first block of North Menard Avenue.
Five people were killed and at least 21 others wounded in shootings across Chicago this weekend, including a 14-year-old boy who was fatally shot Saturday in Humboldt Park.
About 9:30 p.m., he was found in the first block of South Springfield Avenue with a gunshot wound to his abdomen, Chicago police said. The boy was unable to tell officers details of the shooting because of the severity of his injuries.
He was brought to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said. He was identified as Eddie Thigpen of Douglas Park by the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
In the weekend’s latest fatal shooting, a 27-year-old man was killed Sunday morning on the Near West Side.
The man was sitting in a parked vehicle with a male friend about 4:25 a.m. in the 1200 block of West 13th Street when the friend demanded money from him, police said.
The man refused and his friend began firing shots, according to police.
The 27-year-old suffered multiple gunshot wounds throughout his body and was taken in critical condition to Stroger Hospital by another friend who was also sitting in the vehicle, police said.
The man was pronounced dead at the hospital, according to police. The medical examiner’s office hasn’t released his identity.
Two other people were killed in Saturday shootings on the West Side.
About 10 p.m., a 36-year-old man was in the 600 block of North Homan Avenue in East Garfield Park when he was shot multiple times, police said. Witnesses told officers the shooter was someone the man knew.
The man was pronounced dead at the scene, police said. The medical examiner’s office identified him as Robert Hogan, who lived in East Garfield Park.
Less than a half hour later, a 23-year-old man was fatally shot in Lawndale.
The incident happened about 10:25 p.m. in the 2900 block of West Harrison Avenue, police said. The man was shot in the chest and was transported to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
He was identified as Terrance Billops of Lawndale by the medical examiner’s office.
In the weekend’s earliest fatal shooting, a 31-year-old man was killed Friday night in Austin on the West Side.
About 10:15 p.m., the man was standing in a gangway between two buildings in the first block of North Menard Avenue when someone fired shots at him, Chicago police said.
The man suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the body and head and was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.
He was identified as Eujon Eversley of suburban Bellwood, the medical examiner’s office said. An autopsy ruled his death a homicide.
In nonfatal attacks, a 17-year-old boy was wounded in a shooting Saturday.
Just after midnight, the teen boy was dropped off at Norwegian Hospital with a gunshot wound to the leg, police said. He was in good condition.
He would not give details of the incident or the location of the shooting, according to police.
A man was shot early Saturday in West Englewood on the South Side.
The 43-year-old was walking about 1:45 a.m. in the 5600 block of South Hermitage Avenue when he heard shots and felt pain, Chicago police said.
He was struck in the torso and was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in good condition, police said.
At least 14 other people were shot within city limits from 5 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday.
Forty-five people were shot, 5 fatally, last weekend in Chicago.
26 shot, 5 fatally, this weekend in ChicagoSun-Times Wireon May 10, 2021 at 11:21 am Read More »
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability is violating state law by conducting investigations into whether Chicago cops should be criminally prosecuted for fatal shootings, according to documents and sources. Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been sitting on a consultant’s recommendations to fix the problem since July 2020, records show.
The way the city of Chicago investigates fatal shootings by police officers violates state law and Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been sitting on recommendations to fix that for nearly a year, records reviewed by the Chicago Sun-Times show.
According to the documents, the city isn’t complying with the Illinois Police and Community Relations Act, which governs investigations regarding whether a police officer who has shot someone to death should be charged with a crime.
Under the law, which took effect in 2016, a criminal investigation into a fatal shooting by police has to be done by two investigators from outside the agency that employs the officer involved.
It says one of the investigators doing a criminal investigation of an “officer-involved death” must be a specially trained “lead homicide investigator.” Lead homicide investigators must be sworn officers, according to the state’s law enforcement training board.
In Chicago, the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability conducts the administrative investigations into whether an officer violated department rules in a fatal shooting, as well as criminal investigations into whether he or she should be charged with a crime.
The city agency’s investigators have the training to be lead homicide investigators, but they aren’t sworn law enforcement officers, and COPA isn’t a law enforcement agency.
That means its criminal investigations, whose results go to Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for a decision on whether to prosecute an officer for a fatal shooting, are being conducted illegally, officials say. The state’s attorney’s office declined to comment.
Under a federal consent decree — a court order that took effect in 2019 requiring sweeping reforms in Chicago Police Department practices — the city must “use best efforts” to ensure that a law enforcement agency conducts investigations into “officer-involved deaths.”
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Maggie Hickey, the independent monitor of the city’s compliance with the consent decree, agreed to let the city hire the security consulting firm Hillard Heintze to study the matter and offer options on how the city can comply with the law. Hickey declined to comment.
Last July, Hillard Heintze offered Lightfoot’s administration five options, including one in which an Illinois State Police task force — which works with the Cook County sheriff’s and state’s attorney’s offices to conduct such criminal investigations for suburban police departments — also would handle Chicago’s cases. It estimated that would cost $33 million over five years, plus up to $50 million for an office in Chicago for the task force. That option is the “most feasible,” the consultant said.
Another option it gave was to create a city-led task force that would include the state police and other outside law enforcement agencies.
But the consultants said the “best option” would be for the city to get the Illinois Legislature to amend the state law to allow civilian COPA employees to conduct those criminal investigations.
The Hillard Heintze report said the different options could take three months to two years to put in place.
According to the consultants’ report, the number of potential investigations is relatively low. There were 11 fatal shootings by Chicago police officers in 2016, eight in 2017, six in 2018 and five in 2019, according to the report.
An organization called Mapping Police Violence says on a per capita basis, taking into account the city’s population, Chicago was “below the big-city average” for fatal shootings by cops between 2013 and 2019. This year, with three fatal shootings by police, Chicago is fifth nationally among big cities behind San Antonio, Los Angeles, Houston and Phoenix, according to the group.
In 2018, Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke was found guilty of second-degree murder for shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald — who had a knife but was walking away from him — 16 times. Van Dyke, who was fired, was sentenced to almost seven years in prison.
The McDonald killing prompted a federal civil-rights investigation that led to the consent decree.
According to City Hall emails, Lightfoot’s staff repeatedly presented the Hillard Heintze options to Lightfoot last year.
The emails were among a cache of hacked city documents released last month by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a government transparency advocacy group that’s been likened to WikiLeaks.
An unrelated hacker group, believed to be in the former Soviet Union, stole the emails during a series of data breaches that targeted a file-sharing service and also swept up sensitive information from corporations, universities and governments. The emails from Lightfoot’s administration were stolen from Jones Day, a law firm that represents the city and other high-profile clients including former President Donald Trump.
As part of an apparent extortion scheme, the hackers posted the emails on the dark web, a shadowy area of the Internet. That’s where Distributed Denial of Secrets says it found them.
On Sept. 16, according to those emails, one City Hall aide asked another staffer to provide a memo with those recommendations to “put it in [the mayor’s] book again tonight.”
Susan Lee, then-deputy mayor for public safety, noted the memo already had been “submitted at least four times,” according to the emails.
The memo by Lee and deputy corporation counsel Tyeesha Dixon to Lightfoot, dated July 31, had said the mayor was most interested in the option of a city-led task force.
But the Law Department recommended the city hire the state police to do criminal investigations of fatal shootings by officers for the next two or three years until the city could create its own task force, and asked for Lightfoot’s approval by Aug. 4.
Lee left City Hall in October and was replaced last Wednesday by John O’Malley, a former chief deputy U.S. marshal. He’s been a Chicago Police Board member since 2017 when Lightfoot chaired the board, which decides serious disciplinary cases involving Chicago cops.
City Hall sources say Lightfoot sees the issue of complying with the law regarding investigations of police shootings as a priority, but the coronavirus pandemic and the city’s rise in killings and carjackings were more pressing concerns last year. Also, new police Supt. David Brown was trying to get up to speed with the consent decree, the sources say.
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“They don’t seem to give a damn,” says John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, of the city’s noncompliance with the law.
Catanzara says the union has been pushing back on COPA’s “illegal” and unfair criminal investigations of police shootings since “long before my arrival in this chair. It is absolutely in violation of state law.”
The fatal police shooting of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez on March 31 is “a perfect example of COPA getting out above their skis,” Catanzara says. “The department didn’t want to strip that officer. But COPA couldn’t wait to recommend for that officer to be stripped of his police powers. That’s already telling you it’s a biased investigation from the get-go.”
The “most logical solution” to the city’s problem is to have the state police conduct criminal investigations of shootings by Chicago police officers, Catanzara says.
“I hate to put more on their plate, but they are the lead law enforcement agency in the state,” he says. “So it would only make sense that they would be the lead investigators.
“Why is she sitting on it?” Catanzara says of Lightfoot. “Because she has no choice. If she was to turn it over to the state police, she’d be lambasted by at least what’s left of her base because they think that would be surrendering more police reform.”
A city spokesperson offered no response on the issue, and the city has generally declined to comment on any subject arising from the hacked emails.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul sponsored the Police and Community Relations Improvement Act in 2015, when he was a state senator. A spokeswoman for Raoul didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Alexa Van Brunt, director of the MacArthur Justice Center Clinic at the Northwestern University School of Law, said a petition could be filed in state court seeking to force the city to comply with the law.
And Craig Futterman, director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago, said the city could also be held in contempt of court for violating the consent decree by not following the police-investigations law.
That would hinge on the monitor issuing a report “that highlights and dramatizes the areas in which the police department and city are out of compliance,” Futterman said. Then the attorney general could file a motion to enforce the decree and hold the city in contempt.
“The consequences are life and death, public safety and also lots and lots of money,” Futterman said, referring to legal payouts for police misconduct.
A fire broke out in an apartment on the 3rd floor of a senior building about 3:30 a.m. in the 900 block of West Lawrence Avenue, Chicago Fire officials said.
A 65-year-old man was critically hurt in a fire early Monday in Uptown on the North Side.
A fire broke out in an apartment on the 3rd floor of a senior building about 3:30 a.m. in the 900 block of West Lawrence Avenue, Chicago Fire officials said.
A couch was burning and firefighters rescued the man out of the apartment, fire officials said.
He was taken in critcal condition to Illinois Masonic Medical Center, fire officials said.
A Chicago police officer was injured at the scene of the fire but refused medical help, according to fire officials.
Man critically hurt in Uptown apartment fireSun-Times Wireon May 10, 2021 at 10:12 am Read More »
Joshua Mhoon, a Whitney Young senior, is to study with renowned keyboardist Emanuel Ax.
How exceptional a young classical pianist is Joshua Mhoon? Pretty darn exceptional.
Consider that the senior at the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in the West Loop applied to seven of the top music schools in the United States, and not only was he accepted at all of them, he received scholarships from each.
“He is a very talented guy,” said James Giles, a professor of piano at Northwestern University who has been his private teacher for three years. “He has a lot of things going for him musically and intellectually. So, he’s able to play at a very high level.”
Mhoon, who will be 18 in July, ultimately picked the famed Juilliard School in New York. He will be a student of Emanuel Ax, who just happens to be a frequent musical partner of cellist Yo-Yo Ma and one of this country’s most respected concert keyboardists.
But there is one hitch. His total expenses for the first year, including tuition, housing and fees, will be $79,000, and his scholarship only covers $42,000 of that. Undeterred, he and his family launched a GoFundMe page that as of Sunday had raised $20,170 toward a goal of $34,000. (He has other scholarships that will cover the remaining difference.)
If all works out, and he is sure it will, he begins school on Aug. 24.
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Mhoon’s success is all the more impressive considering he was mislabeled with learning disabilities during elementary school, but it was more a question of boredom. When he tested and was accepted for middle school at the Quest Academy in Palatine for gifted students, it turned out his IQ was high enough to gain him membership in Mensa International.
Though he had little interest at the time, Mhoon began taking music lessons when he was 8 at the Steckman Studio of Music in Oak Park. “My mom,” he said, “wanted me to take any kind of music lessons just for the benefits mentally, and I really wanted to play guitar because that’s what second-graders thought was cool back then, but when I went in my hands were too small to fit around the neck of a guitar.”
Mhoon didn’t want to play the drums, so he settled on the piano more or less by default, and he quickly showed an aptitude. “I don’t really remember if I immediately liked it, but it was kind of fun to mess around with my fingers,” he said. In elementary school, he had wanted to be variously a sports star, lawyer (after reading James Patterson) or president of the United States. But the turning point came in middle school when he began studying with a tough new teacher, Brenda Huang in Palatine, and came to see the piano as a potential career.
“She was on me,” he said, “and then I realized, ‘You know what, I like this a lot.’ Because she made me a lot better really quickly, and I was impressing myself. So, I decided, shoot, this has been the most enjoyable experience I’ve ever had.”
At that point, he became obsessed with becoming a classical musician. He began listening to it regularly and practicing longer. At the same time, he learned Franz Liszt’s technically tricky concert étude, “Gnomenreigen (Dance of the Gnomes),” which he performed for three years, including an appearance when he was 12 on WFMT-FM (98.7) “Introductions.” (He was featured May 1 on the show a second time.)
He also used it to win admission to the Allianz Junior Music Camp in Vienna. The November 2015 event included a masterclass with famed pianist Lang Lang, whom he met backstage earlier that year after a recital at the Lyric Opera House. He was later chosen as one of 11 pianists in the Lang Lang International Music Foundation’s 2020-22 Young Scholars program.
As part of the application process to Juilliard, Mhoon’s dream school since his early teens, he had to prepare a one-hour performance video. He played selections by J.S. Bach and Beethoven as well as a 12-minute piano transcription of a suite from Stravinsky’s beloved 1910 ballet, “The Firebird.”
“It’s a monster,” he said of the suite. “Right now, it’s impossible for me to get every note right. But I prefer to miss a couple of notes and keep the artistic integrity rather than play like a robot and try to hit every note.”
After two rounds of auditions, which were done virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, Mhoon was one of just 15 piano students accepted. The big surprise for him was being paired with Ax, who called Giles before the admission decisions were announced.
“He just said that he liked Joshua’s audition,” Giles said, “and if Joshua came to Juilliard he would be very interested in teaching him, which is obviously a great tribute because Manny doesn’t have many students. He’s a very busy concert pianist.”
Unlike some aspiring pianists, Mhoon is not singularly focused on music. One of his surprising interests is the stock market. He has been trading securities for seven years, a pursuit he started after a summer course at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. “I love it,” he said. “I tend to be lucky, and I hold that luck when I’m investing.”
Mhoon’s favorite touring pianists from past and present are Vladimir Horowitz, Maurizio Pollini, Lang Lang and Yuja Wang. Some day, he hopes his name will rank beside those keyboard stars. “I would love,” he said, “to be THE pianist of my generation.”
Kyle MacMillan is a Chicago freelance writer.
