Monica Davey

Finally, after federal agents confronted him with DNA test results proving that he was not the long-missing Timmothy but rather a 23-year-old felon, Brian Rini came clean, according to court documents released Friday as he was charged in Ohio with making a false statement to federal officials.

Rini told the agents that he had recently watched an episode of “20/20” about Timmothy’s case and the Pitzen family’s long search for the boy. Rini said that he had wanted to get away from his own family.

“My heart goes out to the family of Timmothy Pitzen,” Benjamin C. Glassman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said, announcing the charge against Rini, which can carry up to eight years in prison. “I can only imagine the kind of pain that they have been through and that this episode has caused for them.”

A lawyer for Rini did not respond to phone and email messages.

The odd events, which played out over two days amid intense media attention, at first raised the possibility of a happy ending for Timmothy’s extended family, which had waited years for just such a moment. But it soon spiraled into a new layer of misery, as word of a hoax filtered out and the police and relatives in Illinois, where Timmothy had lived, were sent reeling once more. “It’s been awful,” Alana Anderson, Timmothy’s grandmother, said.

On Wednesday, he had emerged, agitated and bruised, along a Newport, Kentucky, street, seeking help from passers-by and saying that he was Timmothy, the missing boy, and that he had escaped from captors and was trying to get home.

Timmothy’s disappearance shook northern Illinois in the spring of 2011. He vanished that May after his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, took him out of an elementary school in Aurora and drove him to Wisconsin, where they were last seen together at a water park.

A massive, yearslong search, wide distribution of posters showing Timmothy’s photo, and urgent pleas from his father and other relatives have failed to locate Timmothy.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/us/timmothy-pitzen-missing-brian-rini.html" id="5c73d05b-803a-311d-a215-46423515f302">The New York Times</a>.

For hours, he insisted that he was Timmothy Pitzen, a missing boy who had vanished in 2011 at the age of 6. He told the authorities that he had escaped from a hotel room where two men had been holding him captive for ages. He said that he had been physically and sexually abused.

Timmothy Pitzen Hoax: Man Charged With Claiming to Be Missing Boy

All along, parts of Rini’s story were peculiar.

On Wednesday, he emerged, agitated and bruised, along a Newport, Kentucky, street, seeking help from passers-by and saying that he was Timmothy, the missing boy, and that he had escaped from captors and was trying to get home. The authorities soon took him to an emergency room at a children’s hospital in Cincinnati, court documents say, but he declined to let the authorities take impressions of his fingerprints, raising early suspicions and complicating efforts to quickly identify him.

Rini’s age might have seemed to be a tipoff: He is 23; Timmothy would be 14. Images of Rini suggest someone beyond adolescence, with a 5 o’clock shadow.

“One can imagine that if you were actually a child who had been abducted since 2011 and subjected to who knows what — if those allegations were true — who knows what kind of condition that person would be in?” Glassman said. “So it’s incumbent on law enforcement in doing the investigation, this one or any others, to make sure that if this person does turn out to be the victim, you’re giving them the care that they need.”

By late Thursday, though, the authorities were able to compare Rini’s DNA to that of Timmothy’s parents, and they were quickly able to rule out the possibility that Rini was Timmothy. The DNA did match a sample already in the law enforcement system, leading them to identify him as Rini, from Medina, Ohio. At that point, the court documents said, Rini admitted who he was.

The authorities said Rini, who was released from prison about a month ago after serving 14 months for burglary and vandalism, had twice before portrayed himself to the authorities as a youth who had been the victim of sex trafficking. Circumstances of those instances were not provided, though officials said they occurred in another part of Ohio.

But Rini had experience posing as someone he wasn’t, records show. In his recent court case, the police said Rini had pretended to be a prospective homebuyer so that he could gain access to a $400,000 custom-built house in a Cleveland suburb and give a party that he promoted on Facebook. The party left thousands of dollars in damage.

Fry-Pitzen’s body was found soon after in a motel room in Rockford, Illinois, after an apparent suicide. She left a note saying that her son was now in safe hands with someone who loved him and that “You will never find him.”

Cities like Chicago had been preparing for the deep freeze for days, and by the time it arrived in earnest overnight on Tuesday, most of life had come to a standstill. Colleges were closed in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, and schools were closed all around. Workers were sent home, meetings canceled, parties called off.

The National Weather Service recorded early Wednesday morning temperatures of minus 19 in Milwaukee, with a wind chill of minus 46; minus 20 in Chicago, with a windchill of minus 45; and minus 27 in Minneapolis, with a wind chill of minus 51.

Officials were on high alert across the region. Temperature records were expected to be broken in a region that has set more than its share of them and where winter’s rages are routinely treated with stoicism and a yawn. Emergency declarations were issued. And residents were given all sorts of urgent warnings and robocalls that ultimately boiled down to two words: Stay inside.

Wind aside, the high temperature in Chicago was expected to be minus 12 on Wednesday, the low minus 22, according to predictions Wednesday morning.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/us/weather-polar-vortex-cold.html" id="517bc34b-66ef-327a-af66-c459dd923605">The New York Times</a>.

CHICAGO — First came the days of snow. Then the fierce winds. Finally the temperatures plummeted to depths that stunned even Midwesterners. The cold that the middle of the country woke up to on Wednesday was the sort that makes cars moan, that makes breathing hurt, that makes any bit of exposed skin sting.

Freezing Cold Settles In Over the Midwest, Bringing Life to a Standstill

On Saturday, a day after Fitzgerald announced that Jayme was safely back, and that a suspect, Jake T. Patterson, 21, was being held on suspicion of murder and kidnapping, many details about what happened remained unknown, even for Fitzgerald. Investigators were still trying to learn why Jayme, whose family was not known to have made any previous contact with Patterson, was targeted and how she was kept out of sight for months.

But the sheriff answered questions about the case and how it has affected his small community in western Wisconsin.

Fitzgerald, 45, has worked in law enforcement for 21 years. He grew up in Barron County, the son of a part-time sheriff’s deputy, and dreamed, he said, of working in law enforcement since he was 5. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What has this case meant to Barron County and how has it changed the place?

A: It’s made people more cautious. It scared a lot of people. Even still today, we have the suspect in custody, but the reason why is still a question out there. People hold their kids a little tighter. I’ve got two kids of my own. You just worry a little bit more when something like this happens. This was a very traumatic and gruesome case.

Q: How does this compare to everything else you’ve seen in your time as sheriff?

A: We had a tornado that killed somebody. We’ve had a domestic abuse turn violent and had people killed. So we’ve seen some crimes, but never a kidnapping of a kid.

So many people wanted to help bring this kid home. There are so many people smiling this morning. It’s so awesome to think about everybody sitting around having a cup of coffee smiling because she woke up in a safe home for the first time in 88 days today.

Q: Knowing now where Jayme was being held — in a town 60 miles north of you — is there anything you would have done differently on the investigation?

A: I don’t think we could have done anything differently because this was random — and yet well planned out. This was what we believe was a random pick of Jayme by this suspect, and then a well-planned-out execution. I think when we get all the details of what he did and what Jayme experienced, we’ll review this case.

But boy, I can’t see anything right now. I’m not patting myself or our team on the back, but they worked hard day and night. They left their families. They worked weekends. They wanted to do it to bring Jayme home.

Q: Was there an earlier moment in the investigation when you thought the end was here — the case was solved?

A: There were a lot of days. I was hesitant when we got the call that they had Jayme. Because we’ve had those calls before: “This is definitely Jayme at the Subway in Michigan.” Or, “She’s at the park in Los Angeles.” So even when we got the call that it was Jayme Closs, I said, “No, don’t react yet.” And when my detective was standing in my office and he said, “We got her,” then it was like — wow! Go there. Get there. It’s 60 miles away. Go and get her and never let her go.

Q: You have two kids — a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old. How has this case affected you personally and your family?

A: I just think about it all the time. You go to bed and you’re thinking about it. You’re like — did I do everything we could have done today? I talked to many of our detectives about that and they felt the same way. They’d wake up at 2 in the morning and take notes about something — did I miss that word? Is there a text message I’m missing? Is there a phone call? Is there a friend we didn’t interview? This case was like nothing anyone has ever seen around here. Personally this case, it took its toll on me and my family.

We live 9 miles from the sheriff’s department but they were always in bed and I was always leaving before the sun came up.

Q: When you thought about what the outcome of this could be, how does the real outcome compare?

A: This is something I dreamed about — being able to bring her back to Barron County. We were able to do that last night. It was something that we had to hope for and never gave up hope on, but after 88 days of this, hope was dwindling.

Q: Did Jayme know that so many people were searching for her?

A:I don’t know. I don’t think we pressed that. We’re letting Jayme go at her pace now. When she wants information, we’re giving it to her. When she wants to give information, we’re taking it from her. Hopefully, we’ll be able to shield her as much as we can and let her work at her own pace to get back to the normalcy that she can get to.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/12/us/jayme-closs-updates-wisconsin-sheriff.html" id="45eb2c24-c59f-364a-a5f7-13364dbd0eb1">The New York Times</a>.

CHICAGO — When Jayme Closs, 13, appeared along a rural Wisconsin road Thursday, she ended an 88-day search by hundreds of investigators. Chris Fitzgerald, the sheriff of Barron County, Wisconsin — where Jayme’s parents were found dead in their home on the night Jayme disappeared — was at the helm of that desperate search, which drew of tips from around the country.

For Sheriff Who Led Search for Jayme Closs, No Sweeter Words Than 'We Got Her'

The deaths Monday night of the two officers, Conrad Gary and Eduardo Marmolejo, were the latest in a series of losses for the Chicago Police Department in 2018 — a year Eddie Johnson, the police superintendent, described as “immensely difficult” during an emotional news conference.

Last month, Officer Samuel Jimenez, who had joined the department last year and had recently finished his probationary period, was shot and killed after a man opened fire in a hospital. And in February, a Chicago police commander, Paul R. Bauer, was shot and killed during a confrontation with a man on a busy downtown workday, not far from City Hall.

Gary and Marmolejo were killed instantly Monday evening, authorities said, after they were hit by a passenger train on the city’s far South Side. The officers, who were working as partners, were answering a report of gunshots after the city’s ShotSpotter technology detected the gunfire.

When they arrived near where the sounds had been detected, they saw someone with a gun and gave chase. As they ran near tracks, a train passed through at speeds of 60 or 70 mph, according to Johnson.

A weapon was found and a person of interest was being questioned in the case, Anthony Guglielmi, a police spokesman, said on Twitter.

Gary and Marmolejo, both in their 30s, were relatively new to the police force and both, officials said, had young children. Gary had been on the job for 18 months, and Marmolejo for 2 1/2 years.

Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, said residents needed to recognize the difficulty of the moment for police officers. “As we go about our time with our families, let us remind ourselves that there are others who cannot,” Emanuel said. “I think it’s really important that we put our arms around the Chicago Police Department and hold them up and support them at this critical juncture.”

The department has long wrestled with other problems, including street violence and distrust from the city’s residents, particularly over officers’ conduct toward black residents.

This year, reports of violent crimes have decreased, but bloodshed from gun violence remains an entrenched problem in the city. As of the start of December, homicides and shootings in Chicago were significantly down in 2018 from the same time last year. Still, over a single summer weekend, 66 people were shot, and 12 of them died.

This fall, Jason Van Dyke, a white Chicago police officer, was convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager whose death was captured on a video that horrified many Chicagoans. Three other Chicago police officers are now waiting for a judge to decide whether they will be convicted of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice for the stories they told, backing up Van Dyke, after the shooting.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/us/chicago-police-killed-train.html" id="d2824d9a-ab43-3280-adcb-f755b9689605">The New York Times</a>.

CHICAGO — A procession of police cars snaked through this city’s streets before dawn Tuesday, guiding to the morgue the bodies of two Chicago police officers who were struck and killed by a train while chasing someone believed to have fired a gun.

2 Chicago Police Officers Killed by a Train as They Chased a Suspect

The judge, Richard Niess of Dane County Circuit Court, issued a temporary injunction on the laws, which included curbing the authority of the incoming governor, Tony Evers, in the rule-making process and limiting the power of Josh Kaul, the new attorney general.

The judge said the Republican lawmakers’ last-minute meeting — a December session just after the election but before the new Democrats could be sworn in — did not meet the requirements of Wisconsin law. And so the measures that emerged from it, he said, “cannot stand.” The case had been brought to court by several individuals and groups, including the League of Women Voters, Disability Rights Wisconsin and Black Leaders Organizing for Communities.

Efforts last year by lawmakers in Wisconsin and in other states, including Michigan, to weaken the power of new leaders who won elections in November set off a flurry of angry protests and, in Wisconsin, several lawsuits.

The efforts also added to a tense situation emerging in Madison, the Wisconsin capital, where government is now split after eight years of complete Republican control under Gov. Scott Walker. Republicans still firmly dominate the Legislature; Evers, Kaul, and other Democrats have taken top state offices.

Evers called Niess’ ruling “a victory for the people of Wisconsin” and said the Legislature had “overplayed its hand by using an unlawful process to accumulate more power for itself and override the will of the people, despite the outcome of last November’s election.”

On Thursday, Evers directed Kaul to withdraw Wisconsin from a multistate lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act — a suit the state had joined under the previous, Republican administration. Until Thursday, Kaul had been blocked from withdrawing Wisconsin from the suit; one of the provisions of the laws passed by the Republicans in December prevented the Democrats from removing the state from the case, as they had promised to do during their campaigns. Kaul filed a motion seeking the withdrawal on Thursday, a spokeswoman for Evers said.

Republican leaders in the Legislature swiftly pledged to appeal Niess’ ruling, questioning what it meant for other unusual legislative sessions that had been called in Wisconsin over the decades.

“Today’s ruling only creates chaos and will surely raise questions about items passed during previous extraordinary sessions, including stronger laws against child sexual predators and drunk drivers,” Robin Vos, the Republican speaker, and Scott Fitzgerald, the Republicans’ Senate majority leader, said in a joint statement.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/wisconsin-lawsuit-ruling.html" id="51beecb1-fac2-3089-a74d-44e7ece45d65">The New York Times</a>.

CHICAGO — A Wisconsin judge on Thursday blocked a set of laws pushed through late last year by Republican legislators in Wisconsin that aimed to weaken the power of the state’s newly elected Democratic governor and attorney general, setting off a bitter fight in the state.

Wisconsin Judge Blocks Republicans' Move to Limit Democratic Governor's Power

Instead, Emanuel, who is due on Monday to turn leadership of the nation’s third-largest city over to his elected successor, Lori Lightfoot, is ending his stint in Chicago doing what he did all along — bluntly pressing his point.

In a flurry of interviews and appearances in recent weeks, Emanuel insistently made what amounted to a closing argument for his policies, his legacy and his city.

He rattled off statistics of a city transformed over the last eight years, with the arrival of corporate headquarters and technology companies, longer hours for children in public schools and higher graduation rates, improvements to the city’s public transit system, the hiring of 1,000 new police officers, millions of dollars in grants for development in struggling neighborhoods, and the unveiling of a reimagined riverfront.

Those things came in counterpoint to the tumultuous chapters that Emanuel will also be remembered for: school closings in Chicago’s black and Latino neighborhoods, the first teachers’ strike in the city in nearly a quarter-century, a period of increased street violence and mounting tension between the police and black residents. Last fall, as a growing cast of potential challengers emerged, Emanuel announced that he would not seek a third term.

Emanuel left his City Hall office on Friday night to a crush of clapping city workers and passers-by, who watched him climb into a vehicle and pull away. What is next for him? Emanuel, 59 and a former congressman and adviser to Democratic presidents, won’t really say. Or at least, not specifically — just that a vacation is ahead, and then back to work.

Here are portions of a recent interview with Emanuel, edited for length and clarity.

Is Chicago safe?

“Robberies, burglaries and auto thefts are at a 20-year low. Those affect your sense of safety. Our shootings have a two-year decline, and our homicides. That’s not at the place I want to see — because it affects the quality of life, let alone your life. I do know this: We have fundamentally changed the philosophy and approach of community policing. It used to be an office — now it’s an approach and philosophy.”

What’s the difference between Chicago and larger cities, which have fewer homicides?

“The police are taking a gun off the street here every 50 minutes. That means, A, the police are working, and B, they’re drowning. Everyone says, look at New York. New York’s got Connecticut and New Jersey. You want Indiana and Wisconsin next to you? Here, give me Connecticut’s gun laws and I’ll give you Indiana’s.”

Education is where he sees his biggest achievements ...

“Every year for seven consecutive years, our graduation grew, and it grew four times faster than the national average. We outpaced the country in college acceptance and attendance.”

“We’ve added four years to a child’s education. If you were born a decade ago versus today, you get four more years. You get pre-K. You get full-day kindergarten. You now get a 7-hour-and-15-minute day, versus a 5-and-a-half-hour day.”

... And his biggest mistake.

As the teachers’ strike was unfolding in 2012, Emanuel said, he should not have canceled a pay raise that teachers were expecting without first discussing the issue with the leader of the teachers’ union:

“It made me the opponent. I should have given her a shot, even if she said, ‘It’s your problem.’ I didn’t give her a chance at the table. That set off a series of dominoes.”

How was he misunderstood?

“Mayor 1 Percent,” he said, alluding to a nickname some Chicagoans gave him to suggest that he catered to rich downtown interests and not to the ordinary residents or struggling neighborhoods.

“I know my personal background, and I get it,” he continued. “But when you look at the battles I took on longer school days, the battles I took to make kindergarten free and full-day, the battles to make pre-K free, the battle for free community college, you name me who in the 1 percent benefited from any of those.”

How do you rebuild struggling neighborhoods?

“For a long time our urban policy was housing. If you want to build something in economically challenging neighborhoods, you’ve got to build neighborhoods. By aggregating the five essential public investments, the private sector will then follow; they won’t lead. That is: safety, schools, parks, libraries and transportation. You put those together, and now you have not one, not two, not three, but four to five separate examples that are bucking the trend.

“So we have a model, and it’s worked. Would I like to do more? Yeah, I’d like to have a federal government that starts funding things.”

Was there too much attention on downtown?

“People say, ‘Oh, downtown’s doing well.’ You want it to do well. It becomes the engine for all the other investment strategies and funds the investment strategies.”

Why walk away now?

Emanuel said that he was concerned that he might not have another four years as mayor in him, not after a run of back-to-back political posts. “Here’s the thing I know: I know what that job requires,” he said. “I had a year and a half in me,” he guessed; “I didn’t have four. I had spent two years with Obama on the front end, eight years as mayor. I didn’t have four full years. And the city of Chicago deserves a mayor for four years.”

Any advice for Mayor-elect Lightfoot?

“I don’t talk about the advice I’ve given Clinton. I don’t talk about the advice I’ve given Obama. And I’m not going to talk about the advice if Lori Lightfoot wants mine. Otherwise, you can’t be trusted.”

What’s next?

“I am never short of an opinion,” Emanuel said, adding that he intends to stay in Chicago and write a magazine column.

“I’m going to have a lot of different things. I’m going to have my hand in the public policy debate and the political debate. And I’ll have my hand in the business world.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="d3af843a-e7b5-359f-ab25-c40c6598bedf" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/us/chicago-mayor-rahm-emanuel.html">The New York Times</a>.

Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's Departing Mayor, in His Own Words

CHICAGO — Rahm Emanuel, the departing mayor of Chicago, is not slipping away quietly.

Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's departing mayor, in his own words

Judge Richard Niess of Dane County Circuit Court issued a temporary injunction on the laws, which included curbing the authority of incoming Gov. Tony Evers in the rule-making process and limiting the power of new Attorney General Josh Kaul.

The judge said the Republican lawmakers’ last-minute meeting — a December session just after the election but before the new Democrats could be sworn in — did not meet the requirements of Wisconsin law. So the measures that emerged from it, he said, “cannot stand.” The case had been brought to court by several individuals and groups, including the League of Women Voters, Disability Rights Wisconsin and Black Leaders Organizing for Communities.

On Thursday, Evers directed Kaul to withdraw Wisconsin from a multistate lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act — a suit the state had joined under the previous, Republican administration. Until Thursday, Kaul had been blocked from withdrawing Wisconsin from the suit; one of the provisions of the laws passed by the Republicans in December prevented the Democrats from removing the state from the case, as they had promised to do during their campaigns. Kaul filed a motion seeking the withdrawal Thursday, a spokeswoman for Evers said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="288e4b71-0fde-44bf-98f8-648acb0c7823" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/wisconsin-lawsuit-ruling.html">The New York Times</a>.

Wisconsin Judge blocks Republicans' move to limit Democratic governor's power

<h1>CHICAGO — The glitz of downtown, the influx of tech jobs, the tourist dollars pouring into city coffers: None of those things are keeping many in Chicago’s black neighborhoods from loading their belongings into car trunks and moving vans and seeking better lives someplace else.</h1>

As Chicagoans go to the polls Tuesday to choose a new mayor in one of the most wide-open elections the nation’s third-largest city has experienced in generations, many African-Americans have cast their votes another way: They have moved out.

Downtown Chicago is booming, its skyline dotted with construction cranes. Yet residents only a few miles to the south and west still wrestle with entrenched gang violence, miserable job prospects and shuttered schools — some of the still-being-identified forces, experts say, that are pushing black Chicagoans to pack up and get out.

Of the nation’s largest five cities, only Chicago saw its population decline in 2017, the third year in a row. Overall, the drops in this city of 2.7 million residents are only slight. But the trend is alarming to city leaders, and demographers say it reveals a larger truth: Black residents are leaving by the thousands each year even as new white residents flow in.

The Rev. Ira Acree said members of his West Side congregation have begun approaching him in growing numbers to say goodbye; last fall, he said, his own daughter moved to Texas. “It’s like, where does this end?” Acree said. “For our community, it’s a state of emergency.”

Chicago stands at a pivotal crossroads, and with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision not to seek a third term, its next leader must contend with a long-standing sense of division between a booming economic core and forgotten neighborhoods.

“People are frustrated and they’re saying, ‘We’ve just had enough. No more mayors for the 1 percent. This city belongs to all of us, not just the people who live in the Gold Coast,'” Sharon Fairley, a former federal prosecutor who also led an agency that oversees Chicago police, said of the hurdles ahead for whoever becomes the next mayor. “The biggest challenge that anyone coming into this position now is facing is generating a feeling of inclusiveness.”

At the same time, other challenges loom large. Residents say they are weary from years of tax hikes and fee increases, but the next mayor will need to come up with another $1 billion in the next four years to continue pulling the city out of a pension crisis, a process for which Emanuel has been credited with shepherding.

Crime and violence remain persistent problems even as the city wrestles with a history of troubled relations between its police force and its residents — problems that reached an apex during Emanuel’s turbulent eight years in office.

“There’s a set of crises that need to be addressed simultaneously when each one of them, alone, is a bear,” said Rep. Jesús G. García, a Democrat who forced Emanuel into a runoff for mayor in 2015 before running for the House last fall. “There’s so much on the line for the city of Chicago. The next four years are going to be a very, very critical time. It could be a turning point, for the better or for the worse.”

Chicago is accustomed to elections in which the outcome is all but certain before the first vote is cast. But this time, there’s a blur of 14 candidates who want to be mayor and no clear favorite. It’s only the fourth time in a century that an incumbent isn’t on the ballot and in at least one of those elections, eight years ago, the winner, Emanuel, seemed preordained.

A who’s who of Chicago politics has stepped forward and Chicago seems, mainly, confused. Polls show no one near the 50 percent mark needed to avoid a second election — a runoff is expected in April — and lots of Chicagoans said they were undecided with only days to go.

“No one has really captured the imagination of the city,” said David Axelrod, a longtime Chicagoan and political strategist. “It is generating kind of a ho-hum from voters, but this is an election of real consequence.”

In a contest that is technically nonpartisan, though Democrats reliably win, there’s a Daley, the brother and son of Chicago’s famed earlier mayors, who ran this place for 43 of the last 63 years.

There’s a county board president with strong union backing.

There’s a New York native who was hired (and fired) by Emanuel to lead the Chicago Police Department; a former leader of the Chicago public schools; a community activist endorsed by Chance the Rapper; and on and on.

The odd and chaotic campaign has played out amid a more standard plot for this city: A corruption scandal is simultaneously unfolding at City Hall, a place all too familiar with corruption scandals. That has left many of the candidates rushing to distance themselves from Chicago’s most powerful alderman, Ed Burke, who was charged last month with a federal crime and whose wiretapped phones have become a topic of wonder and worry on the campaign trail.

The past months have been a marathon of forums, some with the whole crowd of mayoral candidates crushed onto a single stage. Some political analysts wonder whether the result may be truly surprising, propelling some unlikely, low-vote candidate into a runoff election to run Chicago by virtue of happenstance and the spreading of the city’s 1.5 million registered voters across so many candidates. Chicago’s population is split approximately into thirds — white, black and Latino.

Emanuel, who stunned the city in September when he announced that the mayor’s office “is not a job for a lifetime” and that he would not run again, has steered clear of weighing in publicly on the race.

Before his announcement, he was facing a wide field of people who said they would challenge him, as well as criticism over a tenure that included conflicts over police conduct, street violence, and the closings of schools on the city’s South and West sides. And Emanuel’s policies have remained a focal point for criticism from some who now hope to succeed him.

Emanuel has been credited by fiscal experts with pressing to solve some of the city’s most troubling financial woes, in part by raising taxes and fees. For years, the city’s underfunded pension systems have loomed, and fallout from that became clear when Moody’s Investors Service in 2015 downgraded the city’s rating to junk status. His administration put all four of the city’s pension funds on a route to stability, fiscal experts said, but the next mayor will need to find additional revenue by 2023, when the city’s mandatory annual contribution jumps by $1 billion.

“There’s been an overreliance on property taxes,” said Michele Smith, an alderman representing a ward that includes the well-to-do Lincoln Park neighborhood, on the city’s North Side.

Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a watchdog group, said the incoming mayor faced a conundrum. Earlier mayors had already “tapped out every recognizable commodity,” he said, leaving the next mayor with few places to turn for new sources of revenue and, it seems, with little patience from the public.

All along the campaign trail, candidates have been asked to come up with a solution to Chicago’s intransigent problem with violence, an issue that Emanuel wrestled with throughout his tenure. Shootings and homicides have dropped some over the last few years from the city’s most vexing period, but, with more than 550 homicides in 2018, Chicago had far more killings than in the nation’s two larger cities, New York and Los Angeles.

“There are so many layers to this violence now,” said Cleopatra Cowley, the mother of Hadiya Pendleton, a high school student who was fatally shot in a South Side park only days after performing at festivities for President Barack Obama’s inauguration to a second term in 2013.

All the while, tensions between residents, particularly in African-American neighborhoods on the West and South sides, and the Chicago police have mounted. Few events defined Emanuel’s time as mayor more than the months of outrage that followed the shooting of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, and the eventual release of a police video that showed Van Dyke firing into Laquan 16 times.

As a result of the case, a new mayor will arrive as Chicago is under the terms of a consent decree, requiring a negotiated overhaul of the troubled Police Department.

“The next mayor is going to be scrutinized for how they deal with the Police Department and how they deal with the communities,” said Ja’Mal Green, a community organizer on the South Side. “Many people are going to expect the next mayor to come in and move things quicker.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="ddd6d087-69ef-4187-bf61-b71af155cde8" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/us/chicago-mayoral-election.html">The New York Times</a>.

Chicago, seeking a new mayor, sees many black residents voting with their feet

As Chicagoans go to the polls Tuesday to choose a new mayor in one of the most wide-open elections the nation’s third-largest city has experienced in generations, many African-Americans have cast their votes another way: They have moved out.

<h1>Chris Fitzgerald, the sheriff of Barron County, Wisconsin — where Jayme’s parents were found dead in their home on the night Jayme disappeared — was at the helm of that desperate search, which drew thousands of tips from around the country.</h1>

Q: What has this case meant to Barron County and how has it changed the place?

Q: How does this compare to everything else you’ve seen in your time as sheriff?

Q: Knowing now where Jayme was being held — in a town 60 miles north of you — is there anything you would have done differently on the investigation?

Q: Was there an earlier moment in the investigation when you thought the end was here — the case was solved?

Q: You have two kids — a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old. How has this case affected you personally and your family?

Q: When you thought about what the outcome of this could be, how does the real outcome compare?

Q: Did Jayme know that so many people were searching for her?

CHICAGO — When Jayme Closs, 13, appeared along a rural Wisconsin road Thursday, she ended an 88-day search by hundreds of investigators.

For Sheriff who led search for Jayme Closs, no sweeter words than 'we got her'

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Monica Davey

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