An order filed Wednesday outlines the damages owed to Crispiniana Domingo, who in 2016 was arrested and charged with aggravated battery to an infant being treated at UIC hospital. Domingo is owed $3.67 million in compensatory damages and $220,000 in punitive damages from the UIC officer who falsely charged her with beating the child and breaking his arm, according to court records.

Domingo, a Bolingbrook resident, was found not guilty of the original battery charges in February 2018, per the complaint.

She spent about a week in Cook County Jail and was suspended from work for about two years during criminal proceedings, the complaint stated.

Attorney Richard Dvorak said an investigation of the baby’s medical history helped clear Domingo of the charges, but that the allegations and legal process were “absolutely horrible and devastating” for her.

He said the verdict and award was a “huge message to police and detectives that they can’t just ignore all of this medical evidence and prosecute people for crimes they didn’t commit.”

Domingo has not worked in nursing since the 2016 accusation, he said.

“(Domingo) had a really good, productive life and this is a classic example of how malicious prosecution can destroy someone’s life,” he said.

An attorney for the officer who was the defendant in the case was unavailable for comment.

Riot Fest will move from Douglass Park in North Lawndale to a new location set to be revealed Wednesday, its founder shared on social media Tuesday night.

The multiday punk, rock and hip-hop festival has occurred in Douglass Park since 2015, but tensions among festival management and residents have mounted in recent years over issues including complaints of lack of access to the park and disruptions to the neighborhood by a music festival.

Founder Mike Petrynshyn promised to unveil a new concept he called “RiotLand” Wednesday morning in a statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.

In the statement, Petrynshyn thanked Ald. Monique Scott, 24th, for her support of the event and said that the Chicago Park District was “solely” responsible for the festival’s move.

“Their lack of care for the community, you and us ultimately left us no choice,” the statement said.

Scott, for her part, also pinned the move on “challenges” with the Park District as she expressed her support for the festival’s organizers in a statement Tuesday evening. The city department granted the festival approval months late, she said.

“This unnecessary and inappropriate delay in the process, among many other issues, has led to critical setbacks in areas that include, but are not limited to, operational, financial, and community initiatives,” Scott said.

The festival had earned widespread community support with “unprecedented benefits for the local community,” she added. She called the opposition to the festival a “false narrative” and said it came from “only a small group of people,” some of whom do not live in the neighborhood.

The 2024 lineup and ticket sales for the festival running Sept. 20 through 22, will be released Wednesday at 10 a.m, according to the festival announcement.

About 43,330 asylum-seekers have arrived in Chicago since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending them from the southern border in August 2022, according to a city census conducted daily. The city has at times struggled to house and keep up with the needs of the arriving people, but on Tuesday, officials had an unequivocal welcoming message.

“You are our neighbors now,” Johnson said to a crowd of volunteers, migrants and elected officials. “I know that your journey here has been long and difficult, but today we welcome you.”

Originally scheduled to open in April, the shelter faced delays and pushback from community members. On Tuesday, leaders officially opened the facility to about 300 people yet to arrive from the city landing zone.

Unlike the other 17 city and state-run shelters currently housing hundreds of asylum-seekers, the nonprofit Zakat Foundation of America is assuming the costs — partnering with the city, county and Archdiocese of Chicago. Zakat President Halil Demir said about 50 people were staying in the former convent on the campus of St. Bartholomew Catholic Church while renovations on the shelter building itself wrapped up.

He enthusiastically welcomed migrants gathered in the sanctuary Tuesday night, urging them to join in on the city life. “Chicago is a hardworking city, Chicago is a great place to be,” he said. “Chicago needs you.”

St. Bartholomew pastor, the Rev. Michael O’Connell said shelter plans had been developing since late 2023. Zakat Foundation will administer the shelter’s staffing, social services and other logistics and work with Chicago Public Schools to enroll children in school, according to a news release from the organization.

The shelter will only house migrants, officials said. City and state officials announced in April that the city would consolidate its shelters for newly-arrived migrants and American-born homeless people into one system.

State Rep. Lindsey LaPointe, D-Chicago, applauded the opening of the shelter in a statement before calling on local and state leaders to funnel further aid to U.S.-born homeless people. Anti-homelessness advocates have praised the idea of a unified shelter system as a way to curb competition for limited affordable housing resources among the migrant and homeless populations.

At a reception for families and officials, LaPointe said she eventually hoped to “see a strong shelter and service system for anyone experiencing homelessness” but said the facility about to open was a step in the right direction.

The area has needed shelter services for some time, she said: “It’s a marker of the progress we have made and and need to continue to make.”

Deacon Jaime Rios said he’d been working with arriving migrants through the Our Lady of the Rosary Parish, which covers St. Bartholomew and another nearby church, since last year. Some of the earlier migrants to arrive have apartments and jobs now, he said.

Daniela Diaz and Franger Bermudes, with Rios translating, said they’d arrived in Chicago from Texas last month with their 6-year-old son.

“In Texas we were nervous,” said Diaz, 28, adding that they felt much safer in Chicago. “We are OK now, but we want to be better.”

Rios said he urged the families he’s worked with to keep their faith in the American Dream.

“The dream is true,” he said. “But you have to be patient.”

Chicago Tribune’s Nell Salzman contributed. 

Around 7 a.m., Chicago police officers rang their doorbell in Auburn Gresham to ask if she knew Nelson.

Nelson, 44, had been shot and killed early Monday outside BJ Wright Court Apartments in Little Italy, according to police and the security company that employed him.

Officers found Nelson lying outside in the 1400 block of South Morgan Street about 4:10 a.m. He suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the torso and was pronounced dead at the scene, according to police. Police said the shooter was in a dark-colored sedan.

Now Thomas and the two children she shared with Nelson are trying to make sense of his sudden death.

“It doesn’t seem real, because he was such a workaholic,” said Thomas, 42. “We are just in disbelief.”

Thomas and Nelson met at Roberto Clemente High School more than 20 years ago and had been together ever since, she said. Nelson was a doting father to their daughter in particular, Thomas said. He’d take her to museums, restaurants and to the lakefront for “quality time” and they’d been planning to go to the zoo Tuesday, she said. Later in the summer, Nelson had been looking forward to his first-ever plane trip, for a friend’s birthday in Georgia.

He had hoped to one day own his own security company and pass the firm on to his 11-year-old son, Thomas said.

“I want people that work like me, reliable (people) like me,” Thomas remembered him saying.

Besides his job as a security guard with Benford Protection Group, Nelson also worked part time at a 7-Eleven store, she said: “He didn’t want to be sitting in the house. He was like, ‘I can’t just sit. I’ve got to work.’”

Thomas “always” worried about Nelson’s safety on the job in the past — earlier this year a man tried to hit him in a car outside the apartment complex where he died, she said. But she was still stunned.

“You never think it’s going to happen to you,” Thomas said. “You never think they’re going to come to your door, that it’s going to be your loved one.”

In a statement, Benford Protection Group condemned the attack as “cowardly and reprehensible,” offering condolences to Nelson’s family and praising his work with the firm.

“Officer Nelson was a dedicated member of our team, who was loved and respected by the clients he served and the colleagues with whom he worked,” the statement read. “His dedication, bravery, service and sacrifice will not be forgotten.”

The company said it would offer grief counseling to employees, adding that they were cooperating with the police investigation. Police said no one was in custody as detectives continued their investigation.

Police said a boy, 12, was part of a crowd on the 500 block of East 31st Street around 9:20 p.m. when someone fired from a moving silver car and wounded him in the leg. The girl, 15, was sitting in a car when she was shot in the back, police said. Both were in good condition at University of Chicago Medicine.

Officers dispersed a large crowd of about 150 young people from a parking lot near South Martin Luther King Drive and 32nd Street around 9:30 p.m. At least seven cars in the vicinity of the lot had windows or windshields smashed.

Police detained at least two people in the process of breaking up the gathering but said there was no one in custody in connection with the shootings.

After clearing the parking lot, officers slowly pushed the group northward on South King Drive in squad cars and on foot, where people dispersed after about an hour.

Area One detectives were investigating the shootings, officials said.

The injured worker is expected to recover, according to a statement from his employer New Horizon Steel. Authorities and relatives identified the deceased worker as David O’Donnell, 27. His younger brother Patrick O’Donnell said their family was reeling in the wake of his death.

“We’re missing one of our own,” he said. “We just can’t believe he’s gone.”

Patrick, 26, remembered David as “wicked sharp” and an “immensely funny” person who enjoyed sports like golf and wrestling, camping and had an eclectic taste in music that ranged from the reggae act Rebelution to the rock band Tool.

David, raised in Oak Forest, was living in Chicago at the time of his death, where he appreciated the proximity to his friends and where his work as a technical engineer often brought him to skydecks and “top-off parties” around the city, Patrick said.

“He loved the Chicago skyline,” Patrick said. “He would send me pictures of it whenever he had a great view from a building.”

Outside of work, David was a committed White Sox fan and good for a spontaneous dance move, his brother said: “he would bust out a dance move you’d never seen, make up his own groove — he had a passion for life.”

Mostly, Patrick said David’s loyalty was what made an impact on the people he loved.

“He always made it to important events for his family and friends,” he said. “That was the one thing about David. He always showed up.”

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) opened an investigation into New Horizon Steel, where the injured worker was employed, on Thursday.

An OSHA representative said Friday that the administration was also probing general contractor Turner Construction, O’Donnell’s employer High-Tech Stake-Out Inc and scaffolding erectors Adjustable Concrete Construction. The investigations will take up to six months.

Turner Construction said in a statement Friday it had halted work at the Hyde Park site and would offer workers grief counseling.

“This is an extremely sad day,” the statement said. “Our hearts are broken, and we extend our thoughts and prayers to (the workers’) family members, friends, and colleagues at this extremely difficult time.”

New Horizon Steel said in a statement that it would support the OSHA inquiry and do its own investigation “to ensure something like this never happens again.”

Joseph Czuba, 72, is currently awaiting trial in the Will County Adult Detention Facility for allegedly stabbing Wadea Al-Fayoume 26 times and seriously injuring his mother, Hanaan Shahin, over his anger about the war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023.

In the days between Hamas’ initial attack on Israel and the Oct. 14 attack in unincorporated Plainfield, Czuba reportedly became “heavily interested” in the conflict through conservative talk radio and targeted the pair because they were Muslim and Palestinian, according to the Will County sheriff’s office.

Wadea’s death drew condemnation from elected officials across the state and country. President Joe Biden named him in a national address shortly after he died and federal authorities launched investigations into the attack shortly after it occurred.

Shahin’s attorney, John Simon, said the lawsuit, filed late last month in Will County Circuit Court, had been delayed due to the federal hate crime investigation that is currently underway and which has limited some discovery.

“We are welcoming the opportunity to get to the bottom of what caused this man to do this and who knew about it,” he said. “This is a racially and religiously charged incident and anyone who had any ability to stop it should have intervened.”

The complaint accuses Czuba’s wife, Mary Czuba, and his brother, Daniel Czuba, of failing to warn Shahin that Czuba “had extreme and violent thoughts and opinions towards Palestinians and Muslims, including Hanaan and Wadea Al-Fayoume, and presented a risk of foreseeable physical harm to Hanaan Shahin and Wadea Al-Fayoume.”

The suit also accuses Czuba himself of wrongful death and battery and names his and his brother’s rental corporations as defendants.

The 39-page complaint states that Shahin had identified the rental property through Daniel Czuba and moved in about two years before the attack. According to the complaint, Joseph Czuba approached his tenants several times over the week between the start of the war and the attack to tell them he hated Muslims. When Shahin told Mary Czuba about those interactions, Mary Czuba allegedly assured her that she and Wadea were safe.

Czuba also allegedly asked Shahin and her son to move out of the house and told Mary Czuba that he feared Shahin’s “Palestinian friends” would hurt them about three days before the attack.

According to the complaint, Czuba first attacked Shahin while she was giving Wadea a bath and returned to stab Wadea after she had called 911 and before authorities arrived. The last words Shahin heard her son say were “oh no,” the complaint said.

Simon said that should the jury find the case in Shahin’s favor, it would be up to them to determine how much she would be awarded in monetary damages. The public defender representing Czuba in criminal proceedings did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday night.

Czuba’s next criminal court date is 9:30 a.m. June 14, according to Will County sheriff records.

Wilson Barreno, 25, has been charged with attempted murder and aggravated battery toward an elderly person with a deadly weapon, according to an announcement Thursday evening.

Police said they arrested Barreno in the 500 block of West Tilden Street, shortly after he allegedly stabbed the woman multiple times in the 200 block of South Canal Street about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday.

A detention hearing is set for Friday.

Shortly after 12:15 p.m., the workers fell from a scaffold during high winds, landing on the ground, said Larry Langford, Chicago Fire Department spokesman. The surviving worker is in critical condition at UChicago Medicine, a few steps from the site.

Officials said the workers were building a new cancer research center in the 5600 block of South Maryland Avenue.

The workers’ employer, New Horizon Steel, has not been previously investigated, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The administration has opened an inspection into the accident, a, OSHA spokesperson said. The investigation will take up to six months to complete.

OSHA investigators were on scene Thursday where police tape blocked off much of the medical complex. University police officers patrolled the stretch of East 57th Street from Cottage Grove Avenue to Drexel Avenue.

Turner Construction, the general contractor for the project, does not have an inspection history in Illinois from the last five years.

One guessed two minutes. Another guessed five.

“You’re all wrong,” Douglas said. “You get hit in the right spot, you can bleed out in seconds.”

Such are the lessons taught to some teenagers in Chicago, a city just beginning another summer and preparing to grapple with the violence it can bring.

Douglas moved on to the names of the major arteries and how to pressure and pack a wound, hoping to equip the boys with some knowledge of how to respond should somebody be shot where they were standing.

Along with city leaders and public safety advocates, Douglas and his colleagues at the University of Chicago trauma center have spent months preparing. And this summer will bring extra challenges as the city prepares to welcome waves of tourists, delegates and party officials for the Democratic National Convention in late August.

While doctors, nurses and surgeons have made sure they have what they need to treat the wounded in their emergency rooms, city leaders say they are prepared with law enforcement strategies as well as violence interruption and emergency response plans.

Then there are the civilian groups who try to prepare people if they are present for an act of violence, and who try to help those affected by it put their lives back together after the worst has happened. Chicago is increasingly relying on them to step in and aid a city with an uphill road in front of it.

A new police boss

For his first summer at the helm of the Chicago Police Department, Superintendent Larry Snelling faces a balancing act: a major political convention in the middle of the city, along with a host of other large and small summer activities throughout Chicago’s 77 community areas. Meanwhile, CPD faces roughly 2,000 vacant police officer positions.

Police officer scheduling and staffing levels are a frequent point of contention between the city and the Fraternal Order of Police, and this summer figures to be no different. Snelling has said CPD officers will likely have their shifts extended and some days off canceled during the late-August DNC — often the most violent time of the year in Chicago.

According to the Office of Inspector General, the Police Department currently has about 12,000 of its roughly 14,000 positions filled.

Despite the vacancy rate, Snelling said the department would give “as much time off as possible” for officers ahead of the DNC and will dedicate cops to the convention area that week. Then there are the rest of the city’s needs to contend with.

“However, that does not mean we’re going to deplete neighborhoods because we still have a city to protect,” Snelling said.

He said the department will rely on a “neighborhood safety plan” with community groups and update the department’s list of the 35 beats that see the most violence, deploying officers accordingly.

“We’ll make sure that we have an appropriate amount of manpower within those areas to work on those most violent locations,” he said.

Work on the street

Mayor Brandon Johnson announced late last month that the city would train 100 “youth peacekeepers” as part of the effort to quell interpersonal violence over the summer. More than 900 people applied for the positions, according to city officials.

One who is part of that work is Cedric Hawkins. He said his top priority was making sure that the nonaggression agreements between different street gangs on the Far South Side would hold, protecting the lives of some of the city’s highest-risk people.

Hawkins, the strategic initiatives manager at the anti-gun violence organization Chicago CRED, said the agreements are fragile. They’re brokered between gangs and mediated through CRED workers, he said this spring, intended to keep a lid on the bloodshed in the Roseland and Pullman neighborhoods on the Far South Side.

One misplaced threat or misunderstanding can jeopardize a pact, he said. Many of Hawkins’ colleagues spend their years communicating back and forth with different groups to maintain those agreements.

Increasingly common and sometimes just as dangerous are the conflicts that involve members of the same group — trickier to deal with in some ways, he said, because “they (are) looking at you like ‘Why the (expletive) is you in our business?’”

Should a nonaggression agreement break or an argument escalate to shooting, a shot person could get routed to one of the half-dozen trauma centers in and around Chicago that treat the majority of the city’s gunshot wounds.

Preparing early

Days after a pair of springlike days in February saw mass shootings in Rogers Park, Chatham and Grand Crossing, a small group of people formed a circle at a first-aid workshop run by the mutual aid group Ujimaa Medics in Galewood’s Amundsen Park fieldhouse.

The clinic began with an exercise where participants stepped in and out of the circle in response to statements read out loud by a trainer.

“I live in a neighborhood where someone has been shot.” Most participants took a step.

“I know someone who has been shot.” A handful of people stepped in.

“I am afraid I could be shot.” The entire circle took a step inward.

Firearm violence is mostly concentrated among certain populations: A Tribune analysis of city violence data found that since Jan. 1, 2019, the city has recorded more than 3,600 homicides, and more than 14,500 other people were wounded in nonfatal shootings. The data show that in that time more than half of all homicide and aggravated battery victims in the city were Black men less than 40 years old.

On a relatively quiet shift on a Friday this spring, Dr. Abdullah Pratt was sitting in the emergency room at University of Chicago Medical Center wondering what kind of summer it was going to be. That night, Pratt was uneasy.

“We’re seeing the changes in volatility, that’s the way I would describe it,” he said.

In addition to working as an emergency room physician, Pratt runs the organization MedCEEP, an emergency preparedness and violence prevention program aimed at young people on the South and West sides. The group offers EMS and other basic first aid training, trying to offer not only practical skills but also create a sense of agency and calm for participants who may be bystanders to a shooting.

Pratt said that just having the training could help bring down participants’ likelihood of being involved in violence.

“If you teach someone how to save a life, that reduces their chances of taking someone’s life by teaching them ‘Hey, this is what happens when you shoot someone, this is how you save a life,’” he said. “Knowing what to do helps them feel like they can cope.”

Passing knowledge and skills on is also a way to cope for Anthony Douglas, the University of Chicago surgical resident who helped lead the “stop the bleed” training through MedCEEP at Englewood STEM.

Medical professionals ‘hunkering down’

Douglas, speaking shortly after the training in May, said he was bracing himself for the coming months. So was everyone he worked with, he added.

“We’re hunkering down,” he said. “We’re like ‘Wow, it’s summertime and that means that we’re going to see premature deaths and preventable deaths.’”

It means sleepless nights and grieving families. It means blood drives beginning in late winter to make sure patients losing biological reserves can survive. During a shift, he said, it’s hard to process what’s going on, but the weight of the lives can come down hard afterward.

“The more you understand how preventable it is, the more infuriating it is,” he said.

At the MedCEEP clinic, R’Mani Thomas, 15, stuck his hand in the air as far as he could reach and leaned over his desk while he waited his turn to ask a question or three.

“Say you get hit in the head,” he said, putting a palm to the side of his forehead. “Boom.”

Later, he said he enjoyed the training because he thought it was cool, but also because “we might need it, God forbid any situation like that happens.”

Like many of the boys in the room with Pratt and Douglas, R’Mani said he has seen someone get shot or known someone who has been shot.

R’Mani wants to study nursing for his college major, he said. His inspiration came from his late mother, who obtained a nursing certification shortly before she died in 2023.

“She made it look so easy,” he said. “I was like, ‘Alright, I want to do it.’”

“For him to pursue that in the name of his mom, I can’t even put it in words how I feel about that,” said R’Mani’s father, Rico Thomas. “He’s a very ambitious and compassionate person.”

He’d seen someone use a tourniquet on TikTok but hadn’t used one himself before the clinic, he said.

He worries about his friends most of the time, he said — both their physical safety, about “little mishaps that could lead to something” and about their mental health.

“It’s not normal to worry, but it is normal to care,” he said.

Douglas, who had demonstrated many of the first-aid techniques that R’Mani and his classmates had learned, said the “stop the bleed” trainings were part of what help him cope with the destruction a trauma center shift can contain. They are a way for him to meet young people before they wind up in the trauma bay.

Convention complicates matters

Officials said they will look to strike a balance between keeping order in the city and running afoul of people’s rights to protest and freedom of movement throughout the convention area and avoid draining the rest of the city of public safety resources.

Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Garien Gatewood said different city agencies would be collaborating on the approach to balancing neighborhood safety with the needs of the DNC. He didn’t offer many specifics about a plan, instead promising further information soon from the mayor’s office and CPD about “what the plans are for particular neighborhoods.”

In response to a recent OIG report that raised concerns about CPD’s level of readiness for the convention, Gatewood said the department would continue training and preparedness.

The report acknowledged CPD has improved its written policies and procedures after the fumbled response to unrest in 2020. But OIG also homed in on a lack of community input in those policies and “outdated concepts and tactics” in CPD’s plans to manage crowds.

CPD officials countered that the report is “based only on documents” and did not account for interviews or observation of training sessions in advance of the DNC. The police department disagreed with several findings, arguing it had worked with the parties overseeing compliance with the consent decree to put those updated policies together.

“​​What we want to see is the safest convention possible, and that’s what CPD wants to see as well,” Gatewood said.

Gatewood said he expected police officers would work with community violence interrupters and other on-the-ground outreach workers who try to prevent and deescalate conflict.

Asked how the city would gauge the success of those programs, Gatewood emphasized a particular metric. It is about “how people feel safe,” he said.

“If you look at the numbers year over year, you see a lot of things moving in the right direction, but still, there’s a need to really invest in more people,” he said. “I think this is how we get there.”

Despite all the work, Chicago got off to a choppy start, perhaps signaling how tough the challenge will be.

Memorial Day Weekend, considered the unofficial start of summer, saw the shootings of 41 people and the deaths of 10, among them 5-year-old Reign Ware. Fifty-three people were shot over the same holiday weekend in 2023.

Work has been picking up for a while for Wilson, a violence interrupter with the organization Public Equity. The organization works to divert people from getting involved in violence and support victims of violent crime through street outreach, case management and other services.

The spring and summer spike in violence is part of the rhythm of his year.

“We already know when it starts,” he said. “When the weather breaks, everyone’s outside.”