LAWRENCE, Kansas — Douglas County prosecutors rested their case Wednesday in the rape trial of Terrence Shannon Jr. as jurors heard testimony from his accuser’s best friend and others who were present at the crowded bar near the University of Kansas campus the night of the alleged sexual assault.

Shannon, a Chicago native and University of Illinois men’s basketball standout, faces one count of rape or an alternative count of aggravated sexual battery, also a felony. He stands accused of putting his hand under an 18-year-old woman’s skirt, grabbing her buttocks and penetrating her vagina with his finger while in an area of the Jayhawk Cafe called the Martini Room.

Shannon has denied the allegations, which stem from a September trip he and two others took to Lawrence to watch an Illini-Jayhawks football game. His NBA hopes — some prognosticators believe he could be a first-round pick in this month’s draft — likely hinge on the outcome of a trial that is scheduled to conclude two weeks before the NBA draft.

Day three of the trial also included testimony from two forensic scientists, one from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the other privately hired by the defense, whose analysis and interpretation of DNA in the case reached somewhat different conclusions.

Both agreed that no male DNA was detected in swabs taken from the 18-year-old’s vagina and genital area.

The KBI forensic scientist wrote in her report that swabs from the interior and exterior crotch of the woman’s underwear revealed an “insufficient amount of male DNA” to move forward with testing, though she told jurors Wednesday that those levels were essentially too low to say conclusively whether they were even DNA.

But the defense’s forensic scientist called the report’s reference to male DNA “a very misleading statement.”

Using a different measurement threshold than the KBI, the defense’s scientist also concluded “with scientific certainty” that Shannon’s DNA was not in a sample collected from the 18-year-old’s buttocks.

The day began with testimony from the accuser’s 19-year-old best friend and roommate, who gave jurors a now-familiar account of the night, starting with their attendance at the KU-Illini football game, followed by a bite to eat at their apartment, stops at the Jayhawk Cafe (known locally as The Hawk) and a second bar in downtown Lawrence and, then, a return visit to The Hawk.

She told jurors she was next to the 18-year-old as they tried to weave through the packed Martini Room toward the exit, and that she was the one who encouraged her to go back inside after the 18-year-old told her about a cute guy who waved her over to him.

“I figured it would make her night more fun,” she told jurors.

The friend testified she did not see the alleged assault take place and only realized later that night that her roommate’s urgent request to leave was not because of the crowd.

The friend also told jurors that she saw Shannon grab the 18-year-old’s hand or wrist and pull her toward him. But on questioning from Shannon’s attorney, Tricia Bath, she acknowledged she did not share that detail in previous interviews with police or prosecutors.

Later in the trial, Bath called a computer forensics expert to the stand who, acting on a defense subpoena, extracted data from the accuser’s friend’s phone. That data, he testified, showed that the two women returned to the Martini Room about 24 hours after the alleged sexual assault.

Phone records also showed a December group message thread involving the two women and their two other roommates, including the best friend’s sister. The exchange included a link to an ESPN article on Shannon’s suspension from the Illini men’s team following the rape charge, and a message from the friend’s sister that read “got his ass,” followed by two face emojis with dollar signs for eyes and cash for tongues.

The testimony did not mention any response from the 18-year-old to that message.

KU men’s basketball players Hunter Dickinson and Kevin McCullar Jr. also testified on the defense’s behalf, as did Illini guard Justin Harmon and the team’s graduate assistant, DyShawn Hobson. All four were with Shannon at the Martini Room that night; all four said they never saw him grab any woman at the bar.

Shannon’s academic adviser at Illinois, Reba Daniels, also took the stand. She said she also taught courses Shannon took and worked with him during an internship with the university.

“I was completely shocked,” she said when asked about her reaction to the allegations against Shannon, whom she described as kind, trustworthy, hardworking, and a “gentle giant.”

“It’s just not the person I know,” she told jurors. “Even to this day, I’m shocked I’m sitting here.”

Closing arguments are expected to take place Thursday.

LAWRENCE, Kansas — It was an emotional second day in Terrence Shannon Jr.’s rape trial as his accuser took the witness stand and described for a Douglas County jury the night she said the Chicago native and University of Illinois men’s basketball standout penetrated her vagina with his finger while at a crowded bar near the University of Kansas campus.

“I was terrified,” the woman, now 19, told jurors Tuesday, tears welling in her eyes. “I was scared and I was shocked.”

Shannon faces one count of rape or an alternative count of aggravated sexual battery, also a felony. He has denied the allegations, which stem from a September trip he and two others took to Lawrence to watch an Illini-Jayhawks football game. His NBA hopes — some prognosticators believe he could be a first-round pick in this month’s draft — likely hinge on the outcome of a trial that is scheduled to conclude two weeks before the NBA draft.

The woman’s testimony took up much of the morning’s court proceedings. The afternoon was largely focused on testimony from the Lawrence police detective who led the investigation into her allegations, and included black-and-white surveillance footage that appeared to show Shannon and the woman moments before — but not during — their alleged encounter inside the Jayhawk Cafe’s Martini Room.

Shannon’s criminal defense attorneys argued the police investigation had been sloppy in failing to interview possible witnesses and an alternative suspect who had been accused of a similar crime, two weeks earlier, in the same spot in the Martini Room where Shannon’s accuser said she was assaulted.

Members of Shannon’s family, a few friends and his agent sat in the courtroom gallery as the woman recounted an encounter she said started around 12:15 a.m. when she and her friend and roommate returned to the Jayhawk Cafe, known locally as The Hawk.

In the Martini Room, one of two bar areas in The Hawk’s basement, the woman, then 18, said she had three sips of vodka and Red Bull, which she testified was her first drink of the night.

“I thought it would be a good time,” she responded when asked why she went to the bar despite saying she didn’t particularly like crowds or drinking.

The room was hot and crowded and loud, she told jurors, and she wanted to leave. As she and her friend maneuvered through the masses, she said she saw a man wave her over to him. He was tall, she said, had different colored dreadlocks and wore a mustard-yellow shirt.

She thought he was cute, she told jurors, and with her friend’s encouragement, she went back in the room.

That’s when she said the man grabbed her and pulled her to him. She said she thought they would talk and exchange phone numbers or Snapchats. Instead, she said no words were exchanged. With a drink in one hand and a phone in the other, both arms pressed near her chest, she said she looked straight ahead as she felt the man’s hand move under her skirt to her butt.

“I was definitely uncomfortable,” she told jurors. “I don’t know why I didn’t (walk away). But I wish I did.”

Next, she said, she felt his hand move her underwear to the side and a finger inside her for what she estimated to be no more than 10 seconds.

“I didn’t react,” she said. “All I did was stand there in shock.”

When his hand left, she said, she pushed through the crowd to leave and to look for her friend. The two eventually left the bar. By then, she said, she was too hysterical to drive.

Back at her apartment, she started to search for the man’s identity. She remembered that the man had been standing by a KU basketball player at the bar. She eventually identified Shannon, she said, after searching online for photos from rosters for football and basketball teams at KU and Illinois.

She did not immediately call police, she said, fighting back tears, “because I didn’t want to end up here.”

One of Shannon’s criminal defense attorneys, Tricia Bath, spent part of her cross-examination questioning the woman about possible inconsistencies in her statements. For example, the woman told the jury Tuesday that she believed Shannon first grabbed her arm or wrist to pull her to him that night. But, Bath noted, the woman testified in a May preliminary hearing that he did not grab her arm or wrist. She also did not remember telling a nurse that he groped her vaginal area, despite telling jurors that such a groping did not take place.

Later in the proceeding, Detective Josh Leitner of the Lawrence Police Department took the stand. A nearly 17-year veteran police officer, Leitner led the department’s investigation of the Shannon case.

Jurors watched a clip of video surveillance from one of the cameras inside the Martini Room. At least one other camera in the bar was inoperable. The black-and-white footage did not have audio. It showed two people, identified by Leitner as the woman and her friend, as they slowly made their way through the throngs of people and toward an exit door near where she said the alleged assault took place.

A man Leitner identified as Shannon was seen on the video entering the room from that open door. He headed out of view on the right side of the image frame, and the woman eventually vanished from view in that same area.

The footage did not show the two together. It did capture portions of another person whom Shannon’s attorneys previously identified in court filings as a “third-party defendant.” The Chicago Tribune is not naming him because he has not been charged in connection with the woman’s alleged rape.

Two weeks before the alleged encounter between Shannon and the woman, that third-party defendant was accused by a different woman — also 18 — of touching her vagina outside her pants, without her consent, in the same area of the Martini Room. He was not charged in connection with that accusation.

Leitner said he had no reason to suspect that third-party defendant, given the woman’s certainty that Shannon had been the person who grabbed her that night.

But one of Shannon’s attorneys, Oakbrook Terrace-based Mark Sutter, grilled the detective about his decision not to question that person despite the past allegations against him.

Sutter also pressed the detective to explain why he sought a probable-cause affidavit against Shannon before DNA testing had finished and before he interviewed other possible witnesses: other KU men’s basketball players in the bar that night, Shannon’s teammate and the graduate assistant who drove with Shannon from Champaign to Lawrence for the football game.

The detective’s investigation, Sutter said during questioning, seemed to exclude any possible evidence that wasn’t “falling in your lap.”

The trial will continue Wednesday.

LAWRENCE, Kansas — Jurors were selected Monday in Douglas County to decide whether Chicago native and University of Illinois men’s basketball standout Terrence Shannon Jr. is guilty of grabbing an 18-year-old woman’s buttocks under her skirt and penetrating her vagina with his finger in September at a bar near the University of Kansas campus.

The 12 jurors and three alternates — eight men and seven women — were chosen after a lengthy jury selection process Monday in Judge Amy Hanley’s courtroom.

Shannon faces one count of rape or an alternative count of aggravated sexual battery, also a felony. He has denied the allegations, which stem from a trip he and two others took to Lawrence to watch an Illini-Jayhawks football game.

Shannon’s NBA hopes — some prognosticators believe he could be a first-round pick in this month’s draft — now hinge on a jury whittled down over the course of seven hours from a potential pool that exceeded 70 at the start of the day.

Dressed in a dark blue suit, brown shoes and a white shirt buttoned at the collar, sans tie, Shannon sat quietly during the first day of his scheduled four-day trial, occasionally leaning to his right to confer with two of his three attorneys: Tricia Bath, based in Leawood, Kansas, and Mark Sutter, whose office is in Oakbrook Terrace.

His attorneys have appeared eager to conclude the trial before the NBA draft begins June 26.

The trial continues Tuesday with opening statements.

Monday’s proceedings got off to a rocky start as one potential juror fainted from her chair. Other potential jurors and court deputies rushed to her aid, helping escort her to her feet and to the hallway, where she was seen by paramedics.

Prosecutor Ricardo Leal and Bath took turns posing questions of potential jurors, most centered on their understanding of the criminal justice system — did they understand, for example, that the state has the burden to prove Shannon’s guilt — and whether they felt they could make impartial decisions based on evidence and testimony alone.

Three were excused after an hour of questioning, apparently due to their stated negative views about police. Two potential jurors were later excused because of the nature of the alleged crime in the case; one said he had been a victim of a sexual assault, the other said she did not feel she could be fair and impartial.

Two more were excused after disclosing that someone close to them had been accused of a serious crime.

More than a dozen said they had heard about a Douglas County case involving an Illini basketball player, but none said they knew Shannon when, at Bath’s request, he stood to face the potential jury pool.

Shannon’s accuser testified during a May preliminary hearing that she had been in the “Martini Room” at the Jayhawk Cafe in the early hours of Sept. 9, when she saw a man she later identified as Shannon wave her over to him.

“I kind of made eye contact with him and he reached out his arm to grab me to pull him over toward him,” she testified. “So he kind of — I don’t remember where he grabbed me, but he grabbed me, and then as I got closer, he started grabbing on my hip area and my butt area.”

The entire encounter lasted maybe 30 seconds, she said. And at first, she said, she didn’t have a problem with him touching her over her clothes.

But his right hand slid under her skirt, she said, and grabbed her butt. Next, she said, she felt his hand move her underwear to the side and a finger inside her for what she estimated to be no more than 10 seconds.

Then, she said, he “just stopped.”

The two never spoke to each other. She said she froze, a drink in one hand and a phone in the other, both arms pressed near her chest.

“I was terrified,” she said during the May 10 preliminary hearing in Douglas County, according to a transcript.

She told authorities she identified Shannon after searching online for photos of rosters for football and basketball teams at KU and Illinois.

Shannon testified at the same May hearing and denied knowing his accuser or having any physical contact with her. His attorneys previously filed separate court motions questioning the strength of the state’s DNA evidence and suggesting authorities have failed to pursue another suspect.

That person is identified in attorney filings as a “third-party defendant.” The Chicago Tribune is not naming him as he’s not been charged in connection with the 18-year-old woman’s alleged rape.

Shannon’s attorneys previously said they have witnesses and video from the Martini Room that put the third-party defendant in the spot where the 18-year-old said Shannon was standing when she encountered him.

Police have not questioned this third-party defendant while investigating the reported rape, Shannon’s attorneys previously said.

Additionally, Shannon’s attorneys said the third-party defendant was accused by a different woman — also 18 — of touching her vagina outside her pants, without her consent, two weeks before the alleged Shannon incident, in the same location where Shannon’s accuser said she was assaulted. He was not charged in connection with that accusation.

Shannon’s legal team already scored a federal court victory earlier this year, persuading a judge to overturn his university suspension on the grounds that his extended absence from basketball (he’d missed six games at that point) violated his due process rights and potentially jeopardized millions of dollars from his NIL (name, image, likeness) contract and future earnings in the NBA.

A first-team All-Big Ten selection this season and last, the fifth-year guard guided the Illini to a Big Ten Tournament championship — being named Most Outstanding Player in the process — and a trip to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight, where they were trounced by eventual champion Connecticut 77-52.

At her friend’s encouragement, she said, she ventured back in his direction, slowly weaving through the hot and sweaty crowd, its numbers swelled that September night by a KU football victory hours earlier at home against the University of Illinois.

What happened in the seconds that followed is soon to be a question for a jury to answer when the rape trial of Illinois men’s basketball standout and Chicago native Terrence Shannon Jr. begins Monday in a Douglas County, Kansas, courtroom.

Terrence Shannon Jr. rape trial begins with selection of jury to decide fate of Illinois basketball star

Shannon, 23, faces one count of rape or an alternative count of aggravated sexual battery, also a felony, in a case that stems from a trip he and two others took to watch that September Illini-KU football game.

Lawrence police said in an affidavit that the 18-year-old told a detective that Shannon put his hand under her skirt, grabbed her buttocks and penetrated her vagina with his finger while at the bar.

“I was terrified,” she said during a May 10 preliminary hearing in Douglas County, according to a transcript.

Shannon has denied the allegations. His criminal defense attorneys declined comment for this story and filed separate court motions questioning the strength of the state’s DNA evidence and suggesting authorities have failed to pursue another suspect.

The closely watched trial could prove to be another stress test of a criminal justice system that’s been seen nationally as being too lenient toward high-profile athletes accused of sex crimes, and of a district attorney’s office that’s faced past criticism over its handling of sexual assault cases under a previous administration.

The current DA, Suzanne Valdez, a former KU law professor who once chided her university’s handling of sexual assault complaints, was recently the target of a disciplinary hearing in which a panel of attorneys recommended she be publicly censured over statements made toward Douglas County District Court Chief Judge James McCabria, the Lawrence Times reported.

A spokesperson for Valdez’s office previously declined to comment on the Shannon case.

Shannon’s legal team already scored a federal court victory earlier this year, persuading a judge to overturn his university suspension on the grounds that his extended absence from basketball (he’d missed six games at that point) violated his due process rights and potentially jeopardized millions of dollars from his NIL (name, image, likeness) contract and future earnings in the NBA.

Indeed, his criminal defense attorneys have appeared eager to conclude the rape trial before the NBA draft begins on June 26.

A first-team All-Big Ten selection this season and last, the fifth-year guard guided the Illini to a Big Ten Tournament championship — being named Most Outstanding Player in the process — and a trip to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight, where they were trounced by eventual champion Connecticut 77-52.

Shannon was named a third-team All-American this season. But his NBA aspirations could hinge on the outcome of his rape trial. Some basketball writers predict he could be taken as high as no. 13; others have him falling out of the first round.

“A cloud remains over his breakout season and the type of speed, athleticism, shotmaking improvement and defensive tools that would normally generate plenty of NBA interest,” a Bleacher Report article read.

The trip to Kansas

On May 10, as he prepared to receive his sociology degree from Illinois, Shannon appeared in a Douglas County courtroom for a preliminary hearing. A transcript of that proceeding offers the clearest picture to date of that early September evening.

Shannon and two roommates — teammate Justin Harmon and graduate assistant DyShawn Hobson — arrived in Lawrence about 45 minutes before the 6:30 p.m. kickoff, Shannon testified.

Hobson previously said in a sworn statement that he told Illini assistant coaches about his roommates’ plans to attend the Kansas game and was directed to drive the pair to and from Lawrence, a roughly six-and-a-half-hour drive each way.

Shannon testified that his group met some KU basketball players at a tailgate before the game. After the Illini’s defeat, the trio went to the dormitory that houses the basketball team, where, Shannon testified, he stayed for about an hour, drinking shots of Crown Royal.

Next, Shannon said, he and his roommates relocated to Jayhawk Cafe, known locally as “The Hawk.” Joined by other members of KU’s basketball team, they congregated in the bar’s Martini Room. Shannon continued to drink, testifying that his level of intoxication was a three or four on a scale of one to 10.

“Were you drunk?” his attorney asked.

“No, sir,” Shannon responded.

“And did you understand what was going on around you?”

“Yes, sir.”

At KU, where the basketball program was started by the game’s founder, James Naismith, the team’s players are celebrities, and their appearance at The Hawk drew the attention of other patrons. Shannon said he encountered other women that night, but he denied knowing his accuser or having any physical contact with her.

He also told his attorney he went to the bar that night mindful of his ultimate goal of being in the NBA.

“And do you monitor yourself and your behavior to make sure you don’t jeopardize that?” his attorney asked.

“All the time,” Shannon responded.

Shannon testified he left The Hawk near closing time, 2 a.m., and eventually returned to Champaign.

By then, his 18-year-old accuser was back at her apartment, she testified, tears in her eyes as she searched her phone for a photo of the man she said assaulted her.

30 seconds at The Hawk

Hours earlier, the 18-year-old woman had been at the KU football game with a friend. The two stopped home, she said, went to Jayhawk Cafe, left for a second bar and then returned to Ohio Street for another visit to The Hawk.

It was around 12:15 a.m. when they got there, she said. Down in the Martini Room, she had three sips of vodka and Red Bull, which she testified was her first drink of the night.

It was then that she said she saw the man she later identified as Shannon wave her over. She recognized one of the men next to him as a KU basketball player, she told the court, and as she got closer, she could see a woman to Shannon’s left “grinding on him.”

“I kind of made eye contact with him and he reached out his arm to grab me to pull him over towards him,” she testified. “So he kind of — I don’t remember where he grabbed me, but he grabbed me, and then as I got closer, he started grabbing on my hip area and my butt area.”

The entire encounter lasted maybe 30 seconds, she said. And at first, she said she didn’t have a problem with him touching her over her clothes.

But his right hand slid under her skirt, she said, and grabbed her butt. Next, she said she felt his hand move her underwear to the side and a finger inside her for what she estimated to be no more than 10 seconds.

Then, she said, he “just stopped.”

The two never spoke to each other. She said she froze, a drink in one hand and a phone in the other, both arms pressed near her chest.

“It didn’t even comprehend that was an option to me at that point,” she told the court when asked why she didn’t try to push him away. “I was so scared and shocked that I — the only way that I could react was standing there.”

When it was over, she said she pushed through the crowd in search of her friend, who was close but separated by other people. She said her friend didn’t immediately understand when she told her they needed to leave. She made her way to a hallway where she sat for a minute, she said, until her friend found her. The two left and drove home, getting there around 1:15 a.m.

In bed, replaying the events of the night, she said she grabbed her phone to search for the man’s identity. She knew the Jayhawks’ opponent that night had been the Illini, so, she said, she started scanning photos of football players for both teams. Remembering that he had been near a KU basketball player, she pulled up photos of the KU team and then the Illini squad.

She stopped at number 0: Terrence Shannon Jr.

“Immediately when I saw that picture, I knew it was him,” she told the court.

She testified that she didn’t initially think to call Lawrence police.

“My first thought was processing what had happened rather than immediately going to the police,” she said. “I didn’t even know if going to the police was an option I wanted to pursue, but I just realized that his actions are not just and I need justice, and girls should not have this happen to them.”

She spoke with Lawrence police that afternoon and went to a hospital the same day to have a sexual assault nurse examination kit collected.

Three months later, Lawrence police obtained a warrant for Shannon’s arrest, sparking his short-lived suspension from basketball and a university misconduct investigation that was eventually closed due to insufficient evidence.

A rejected plea deal and an alternative suspect

On May 31, the Lawrence Journal-World reported that Shannon rejected the state’s plea offer to amend his charge to one felony count of aggravated battery that was sexually motivated. He would have had to have registered as a sex offender for 15 years but could have avoided prison.

His attorneys, meanwhile, filed separate motions leading up to the trial, both of which attempted to poke holes in the state’s case.

In one motion, Shannon’s attorneys wrote that a Kansas Bureau of Investigation report on DNA evidence found no male DNA in swabs taken from the 18-year-old’s vaginal and external genital areas.

A forensic scientist commissioned by the defense reviewed the state agency’s data and concluded in a report filed by the defense that Shannon was excluded from a DNA profile found in a swab of the woman’s buttocks; a partial profile from an inner thigh swab was not suitable for comparison, the scientist wrote.

The scientist’s review of the KBI report also determined that the quantity of possible DNA in samples taken from the woman’s underwear were essentially too low to say whether they contained male DNA.

“The claim that ‘male DNA’ was located on the underwear swabs is not scientifically valid and should be excluded,” Shannon’s attorneys wrote in the motion.

Both sides asked the court to weigh in on whether the state’s DNA evidence, or the report from the defense’s forensic scientist, could be introduced at trial — a motion known in legalese as a Daubert hearing.

However, “in the interest of reaching trial expeditiously,” Shannon’s attorneys withdrew their request for such a hearing — his attorneys also opposed a state request to push back the trial’s start date during a status conference Tuesday in which the case was reassigned to a new judge due to a scheduling conflict.

Three days before the trial, Shannon’s lawyers won a judge’s approval to introduce evidence at trial of an alternative suspect.

That person is identified in attorney filings as a “third party defendant.” The Chicago Tribune is not naming him as he’s not been charged in connection with the 18-year-old woman’s alleged rape.

Shannon’s attorneys said they have witnesses and video from the Martini Room that put the third-party defendant in the spot where the 18-year-old said Shannon was standing when she encountered him.

Police have not questioned this third-party defendant while investigating the 18-year-old’s reported rape, Shannon’s attorneys said.

Additionally, Shannon’s attorneys said the third-party defendant was accused by a different woman — also 18 — of touching her vagina outside her pants, without her consent, two weeks before the alleged Shannon incident, in the same area of the Martini Room where Shannon’s accuser said she was assaulted. He was not charged in connection with that accusation.

The state sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent the jury from hearing evidence of that previous incident, arguing in a court filing that “neither the third party’s presence at a crowded bar, nor any evidence of his alleged propensity to commit unrelated crimes, indicate that the victim misidentified the defendant.”

And during cross-examination at the May 10 hearing, Shannon’s accuser said she was certain that the hand that touched her belonged to Shannon.

“I know that he never left physical contact as he grabbed me to pull me over,” she testified, “and then that was the incident.”

Seabaugh, then 36, and his wife Sheri were walking along the shore that afternoon when he spotted a gray garbage bag in shallow water. Angered at the brazen act of littering, he planned to take the bag with them to deposit in the nearest trash can.

All these years later, he can remember everything about the moment. The bag tied with a knot, heavy, sagging as he lifted it. He felt the thin plastic, grasping for some clue to its mysterious contents.

His stomach climbed to his throat.

Oh my God, he thought. What is this?

Seabaugh’s discovery would spark a multi-agency investigation into one of the region’s most horrific crimes, the murder of 23-year-old Decatur mother Karyn Hearn Slover. Four years and thousands of tips later, authorities homed in on her suspected killers: ex-husband Michael Slover Jr., and his parents, Michael Slover Sr. and Jeannette Slover.

Macon County prosecutors built a case entirely on circumstantial evidence, some of it considered at the time to be cutting-edge forensics — dog hair DNA analysis and comparisons of concrete and cinder samples. In the end, they convinced a jury that the elder Slovers murdered their former daughter-in-law, with their son’s tacit approval, to stop her from taking her 3-year-old son and moving out of state.

In the two decades since the Slovers were sent to prison, the salacious details of their case have become fodder for the burgeoning true-crime entertainment industry. All the while, the Slovers have insisted they’re innocent and fought in court to clear their names.

For Michael Slover Sr., that fight ended with his death in prison in 2022. But his wife and son have continued to push for a new trial, aided by the Illinois Innocence Project, a nonprofit based at the University of Illinois at Springfield that works to overturn convictions in a state infamous for sending innocent people to prison.

Earlier this year, IIP attorneys launched what could be the best, and last, attempt at exonerating the Slovers. In a sweeping, nearly 2,000-page amended petition for post-conviction relief filed in February in Macon County court, attorneys say DNA testing previously unavailable during the initial trial “conclusively demonstrates the Slovers’ innocence.”

“Disturbingly,” attorneys wrote, authorities have not run the new DNA evidence through a federal database that could identify Karyn’s real killers, which, they added, could be three men whose names first surfaced as possible suspects days after Karyn disappeared.

The petition also mounts a detailed attack on the state’s evidence in the case, calling it a “junk science house of cards” that “completely collapses when subjected to scientific review and modern understandings of forensic science.” It goes on to accuse prosecutors of using false and misleading witness testimony to win a conviction.

Macon County State’s Attorney Scott Rueter did not respond to multiple messages seeking an interview for this story. Karyn’s family declined to be interviewed.

The question of whether the Slovers should receive a new trial now falls with 6th Judicial Circuit Associate Judge Rodney Forbes. The next status hearing is scheduled for July 11.

“The murder of Karyn Hearn Slover was a terrible tragedy,” IIP attorneys wrote in the petition. “This tragedy was further compounded by convicting three innocent people for a crime they did not commit.”

Part 1: The aspiring model goes missing

Friday, Sept. 27, 1996.

Two days before the Seabaughs’ lake trip.

Melany Jackson sat in the lunchroom inside the Decatur Herald & Review newspaper office, where she worked part time as a layout clerk. In two years, she had come to make friends with several co-workers, including an energetic and outgoing ad rep named Karyn.

At work, or while playing racquetball, the two shared stories from their lives. Jackson heard Karyn talk about her 3-year-old son Kolten, about her struggles with her ex-husband and former in-laws, and about her goal of becoming a model.

Karyn had professional headshots taken (photos that were widely circulated after her disappearance and murder), and had done some local jobs. But she wanted more.

A month or two earlier, Karyn applied to a company called Paris World International, based in Savannah, Georgia. For a yearly fee, the company offered opportunities as film extras or models in runway shows or catalogs.

Earlier that Friday, Karyn and her boyfriend, fellow newspaper employee David Swann, went to the post office and overnight-mailed a contract to the company, which, she excitedly told Jackson, had lined up a modeling job for her in Atlanta.

It wasn’t a permanent move, but, Jackson remembered, “it felt like a door was opening.”

Karyn left work around 5 p.m., driving Swann’s 1992 Pontiac Bonneville, which, he would later tell authorities, he let her borrow because her car needed an oil change and new brakes.

She had to pick up Kolten from her former in-laws and stop at the mall to buy a dress for a wedding she and Swann were attending the next day (there is debate as to which task she intended to do first). Eventually, she planned to swing by his place to pick up laundry she left there and then head home to make dinner for her son.

Swann, who had been at the wedding rehearsal that night, got home a little before 10 p.m. He spotted Karyn’s laundry bag in the same place she left it.

“It didn’t click right away,” he would later tell investigators.

Around the time Swann came home, a Piatt County sheriff’s deputy pulled over to investigate an abandoned Bonneville on the westbound shoulder along Interstate 72, about 40 miles northeast of Decatur.

The car was still running, its driver’s side door open, keys still in the ignition, dome light and tail lights and headlights still on.

There were no immediate signs of foul play.

The deputy ran the car’s unique license plate, CADS 7, and a dispatcher contacted its owner, Swann, who, upon learning there was no sign of Karyn or Kolten, called Karyn’s parents before hurrying to the stretch of interstate.

Karyn’s father, Larry Hearn, called the Slovers’ house in Mt. Zion to ask where Karyn and Michael Jr. were.

Junior’s at work, Jeannette Slover replied, and Karyn hadn’t come to pick up Kolten.

Hearing that Kolten was still with the Slovers, Larry Hearn broke down in tears.

Melany Jackson’s phone rang around 7 the next morning. A co-worker at the newspaper told her Karyn was missing, her car found near Champaign. Jackson hurried to the office, where several dozen colleagues made posters with Karyn’s picture and a photo of a similar Pontiac Bonneville. They split into search parties and fanned out in different directions.

The search continued through Saturday and into Sunday. By Monday, Jackson was at Richland Community College in Decatur, about to teach an English writing class. A student approached her in the bathroom. She knew Jackson worked at the newspaper and heard from a relative in law enforcement that authorities were soon to hold a news conference about a discovery made the previous day at Lake Shelbyville, about 30 miles south of Decatur and 50 miles south of where the Pontiac was found.

“No! It’s not her!” Jackson reflexively yelled. “Whatever they found is not her!”

Shocked at what they might have stumbled upon on that Sunday afternoon, Tracy and Sheri Seabaugh took their boat to the nearest marina. There, they convinced an employee to let them use the phone to call the Moultrie County sheriff.

Deputy Jeff Thomas was dispatched to the call. He followed the Seabaughs’ boat to the shoreline where they found the garbage bag. The couple was visibly shaken, Thomas remembered.

“It’s probably just a deer carcass dumped by a poacher,” he told them, and himself.

Not wanting to disturb any evidence, Thomas donned gloves and cut into the side of the bag with a knife. There looked to be a second gray garbage bag inside the first, this one sealed with duct tape. He cut it open too.

The color drained from Thomas’ face, and the 23-year veteran deputy nearly collapsed at the sight of blond hair draped over a human ear.

Part 2: The Slover task force

Authorities quickly descended on the lake. They pulled five other similar garbage bags from the water that week, containing hands and feet, an arm, a thigh and parts of a torso. Some body parts would never be found.

Dental records confirmed it was Karyn. An autopsy concluded she’d been shot seven times in the head with a .22-caliber handgun before being dismembered, likely with a power saw. Neither the gun nor the saw was ever located.

With a sprawling potential crime scene spanning multiple jurisdictions, authorities created a task force of local, state and federal investigators to catch Karyn’s killer or killers.

At the lake, they found cinders, grasses, weeds and broken concrete with her remains. A blood stain, later confirmed to be Karyn’s, and at least one fingerprint — both on the bridge spanning the lake near Findlay Marina — suggested that was the spot where the bags were dumped into the water.

Two more fingerprints were discovered inside the front passenger window of the Pontiac. None of those prints ended up identifying a suspect. Curiously, authorities never tested unknown material under Karyn’s fingernails on her left hand.

Task force members initially looked at the men in Karyn’s life.

Though Swann, then 31, had been friends with Karyn for months, the two only recently started dating before her murder. He also had a past arrest that raised red flags among investigators.

Five years earlier, Swann was arrested in nearby Coles County and charged with breaking into his estranged wife’s apartment, armed with a .22-caliber handgun. Inside, he hit his wife while threatening to kill her. Swann eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated battery, court records show, and was sentenced to probation.

Authorities questioned Swann about the incident and about his whereabouts the night Karyn disappeared.

He told investigators he had been at a Decatur restaurant until about 7:30 that night. Next, he stopped at a hardware store to copy keys for a joke he planned on his friend, the groom in the wedding he and Karyn were to attend that weekend. Then, he went to the church for the wedding rehearsal.

There was a roughly half-hour gap in his alibi that he couldn’t initially account for. He eventually told police he stopped at an ATM during that time. Bank records and footage from the ATM camera verified his story. To police, he was no longer a suspect.

Swann declined to be interviewed for this story.

Investigators also focused on Michael Slover Jr. He and Karyn attended the same community college and met through mutual friends. They married in 1993 and welcomed their son Kolten that same year. Karyn’s friends later testified to seeing him physically abuse his wife, though, defense attorneys argued, they only told authorities about the alleged abuse after the case was in the media.

By May 1996, the marriage had ended. Their divorce agreement named Karyn as Kolten’s primary custodian and gave Michael alternate weekends with his son. And, in a stipulation that would come to be a focus for police and prosecutors, it read that the boy’s grandmother Jeannette would continue to be his babysitter until he started kindergarten, or until the parties agreed otherwise.

Michael gave investigators a three-page handwritten account of his actions that Friday, from 12:30 p.m. when he started his first job as security at a grocery store, until 2 a.m. the next morning, when he finished his third job as a bar bouncer.

His alibi was airtight and detailed — almost too detailed, Thomas remembered.

“I believe he could tell us exactly the denomination of bills and change he got to buy a milkshake,” remembered Thomas, who eventually became Moultrie County sheriff before retiring in 2014. “Most people wouldn’t recall all those fine details. It was overkill.”

Two of Karyn’s ex-boyfriends were also questioned. Both had alibis that excluded them as suspects.

Amid unrelenting press coverage and a torrent of tips about possible suspects, pressure to solve Karyn’s murder mounted. Decatur’s roughly 82,000 residents, meanwhile, reeled from another grisly crime.

Two years before Karyn’s murder, 30-year-old realtor Sherry L. Lewis was found fatally beaten and strangled in a Decatur home she had an appointment to show. Her case remains unsolved.

Then, in September 1995, 3-year-old Sara Lynn Kramer vanished from her family’s Decatur home. Her body was found by a fisherman in the Sangamon River four days later. It would be another five years before police identified her uncle as her killer.

Detectives on the Slover task force looked closer at Karyn’s life and uncovered financial troubles they felt could provide clues. She struggled to pay rent and utilities. She’d been hit with hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees and returned check penalties. Her car was almost repossessed. She contemplated bankruptcy.

The month she was killed, Karyn pawned a diamond ring for $120 despite the pawnbroker telling her it was worth more. Still, the investigation was never able to tie her money problems to a suspect, and as the months went by, the case grew cold.

That’s when authorities looked closer at Karyn’s former in-laws.

Part 3: The unlikely suspects

Michael and Jeannette Slover were childhood sweethearts in suburban St. Louis, married just after high school in 1966. They eventually moved to Mt. Zion, a tiny village just south of Decatur. Jeannette stayed home to raise their two children, Michael Jr. and Mary, while Senior worked in a trade union. He sold used cars from home, at first, and eventually opened Miracle Motors used car lot on Illinois Route 121, a few minutes from home, which he ran on nights and weekends.

They were content to live a quiet life at home. They listened to NPR on weekends, took evening walks and shared ice cream cones at Dairy Queen.

Investigators questioned the couple multiple times. They said they last saw Karyn around 5:45 p.m. the day before she disappeared, when they met at a McDonald’s to pick up Kolten.

Senior said he went to work at a Clinton power plant the next day while Jeannette stayed home to watch Kolten and a friend’s 2-year-old. The friend came to collect her child around 3:30 p.m. and Senior returned home about an hour later. He said he had lunch and watched television while his wife took their grandson to Kmart to look for a toy.

Jeannette and Kolten returned sometime after 6 p.m., she said. By then, her husband had left for Miracle Motors.

Karyn typically picked up her son from the Slovers between 5 and 6 p.m. But, Jeannette told authorities, it was not uncommon for her former daughter-in-law to be late.

In her grand jury testimony, she said she once told Karyn: “Don’t worry if you’re late. If you get a chance to call, OK. If not, just don’t worry about it.”

Jeannette said she called Karyn’s apartment and got no answer, so she took Kolten to the car lot around 8 p.m. She and her husband planned to take their grandson to the McDonald’s playland but he fell asleep on the drive over, she said, so they went home instead.

There had been no one at the car lot that evening and no one who saw the couple and could corroborate their story. In essence, they were each other’s alibis.

Eighteen months after Karyn’s murder, a search warrant in hand, police descended on the Slovers’ used car lot. By then, the family’s names had been in the news as possible suspects. They planned to sell the business, Michael Sr. told police, because no one would buy a car from him.

The lot was blanketed in snow, so investigators brought in a machine normally used by road crews to melt asphalt. Once the snow was gone, they divided the lot into a grid and began excavating the ground, aided by a forensic geologist and former Canadian police constable, Richard Munroe.

After three days of searching, police left Miracle Motors with 60, five-gallon buckets of excavated ground. They took the buckets, uncovered, to a warehouse where teams spent weeks sifting through them like prospectors, searching for clues.

Authorities returned to the car lot, now under new ownership, in September 1999. This time, they brought a University of Illinois professor who they asked to search the property for specific plants — foxtail, nimble will and switchgrass — found with Karyn’s remains.

On Jan. 27, 2000, more than 1,200 days after the Seabaughs’ horrific discovery at the lake, a Macon County grand jury indicted Michael Slover Sr., his wife and their son on first-degree murder charges and, for the male Slovers, concealment of a homicide.

Part 4: The case against the Slovers

The closely watched trial began in April 2002, but not before a flurry of activity.

Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty (still an option at the time), which gave the Slovers access to a state fund designed to help pay for investigators and expert witnesses in capital cases.

Those extra resources were cut off when the state’s attorney took the death penalty off the table.

The two public defenders appointed to represent Michael Sr. and his son — Jeannette had the lone private defense attorney the family could afford — tried to have the case continued, saying the loss of investigators and their existing caseloads left them unable to adequately prepare for the trial.

The request was denied, as was a request by the defense to move the case out of Macon County, citing a jury pool they argued had been biased by extensive media coverage and public comments made by the state’s attorney.

The state built its case around the theory that Karyn’s plan to take Kolten and move out of state to pursue modeling had enraged the Slovers — especially Jeannette, whose attachment to her grandson, they argued, bordered on fixation.

And so, prosecutors said, Michael Jr. crafted an airtight alibi while his parents killed and dismembered Karyn when she came to pick up Kolten that Friday in September. They used concrete from the car lot to weigh down the bags, the state said, hoping her remains would sink to the bottom of Lake Shelbyville, never to be found.

The Slovers “staged” Karyn’s car along the interstate, one prosecutor said during the trial, to draw attention away from the crime scene at Miracle Motors, giving the family time to dispose of any evidence — witnesses testified to seeing Michael Jr. burning things and weed-whacking on the property shortly after Karyn disappeared.

Among the testimony presented during trial, jurors heard that the excavation at Miracle Motors uncovered jean rivets and a metal button. A state police forensic scientist testified that both appeared to match the type of buttons and rivets on the jeans Karyn was wearing when she died. The same forensic scientist said a burned cloth button from the lot was also similar to the cloth buttons on Karyn’s shirt.

Munroe, the Canadian geologist, testified that concrete and cinders at the lot were similar to those found with Karyn’s remains. The university professor who searched Miracle Motors for specific plants identified with Karyn’s body testified he located two of the three varieties at the car lot.

And, a little over a decade after human DNA analysis was first used in a criminal investigation, the state presented testimony from Dr. Joy Halverson, who said she analyzed DNA from a strand of dog hair stuck to the duct tape that sealed one of the bags containing Karyn’s remains and concluded it could have come from one of the Slovers’ dogs.

The defense team tried to poke holes in the state’s case, arguing, among other points, that the Slovers regularly burned discarded clothing or other belongings left in the cars they purchased at auction for resale, and that the city had issued a notice three days after Karyn’s disappearance to cut tall weeds.

Even if the hair belonged to the Slovers’ dog, defense attorneys argued, it could have been transferred from Kolten or Karyn at any time. And, during cross-examination, the university professor who testified about plants at the car lot also acknowledged that all three types found with Karyn’s remains also grew in his backyard.

The nearly five-week trial ended May 17, 2002, when the jury returned a unanimous verdict against the Slovers. All three received 60-year prison sentences for the murder; father and son were given an extra five years for concealing the crime.

Before sentencing, the family had a chance to make a statement. All three said they were innocent.

“I just hope that someday the truth comes out,” Michael Sr. said in his statement, “and that somehow everyone knows that we had nothing to do with this.”

Melany Jackson did not attend the trial. She didn’t need to. In her mind, she knew who killed Karyn the minute she learned her friend and co-worker was dead.

All these years later, she can’t remember where she was when the verdict came down, or how she found out the Slovers had been convicted. She just remembers her first thought when she heard the news.

Finally.

Part 5: The IL Innocence Project

In the spring of 2002, as the Slover trial was about to begin, a student at the University of Illinois at Springfield pitched a project idea for her legal studies class.

Her husband, a Champaign defense attorney, heard about the case, she told the professor. And it appeared to them to be little, if any, hard evidence of the family’s guilt.

Her professor was Larry Golden. About a year earlier, inspired by a conference organized by the attorneys behind the Innocence Project, Golden and two others started a similar effort, then called the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project.

One of the founders, Springfield private investigator Bill Clutter, was familiar with the Slover case, having briefly worked for the defense team when it had access to capital defense funds.

The student eventually presented her report to Golden’s class at the end of the semester, after the trial had ended. Her assessment was that the family was innocent, Golden, 80, recalled, “or at a minimum should never have been found guilty.”

“In our minds, we knew this case wasn’t right,” said Golden, who remains the project’s founding director on its leadership team.

At the start, students in Golden’s class worked with the family’s appellate attorney on a motion for post-conviction relief. And as the project grew and added staff, its attorneys eventually took on the Slovers’ case.

Along the way, the family’s efforts met resistance in the courts.

In 2009, for example, the Slovers asked for new testing on the fingerprint found near Karyn’s blood on the bridge guardrail at Lake Shelbyville, and on a print left on a fast-food bag in her car. The state opposed the testing; an appeals court agreed.

The state also fought the Slovers’ request for DNA testing.

“Generally,” Golden said, “prosecutors and judges at the local level tend to be extremely resistant to admission of error, reopening cases and, in some cases like the Slovers, any belief that there was a wrong committed and that the people could be innocent.”

Part 6: The Slovers’ defense

By 2014, a Macon County judge cleared the way for the family’s attorneys to pursue DNA testing.

A partial DNA profile found on a piece of duct tape that sealed one of the bags containing Karyn’s remains excludes all three Slovers, IIP attorneys said in the court filing. Instead, the profile points to at least two unknown people, one of whom is male.

Other pieces of evidence tested at the family’s request revealed DNA profiles that exclude Jeannette and her son, the petition reads. One of those profiles appears to belong to at least three unknown males.

Analysts were unable to extract a suitable profile from a piece of hair submitted by Michael Sr. for comparison to the additional DNA samples. Still, attorneys argued in court filings that the DNA results are enough to exonerate the Slovers.

And yet, the family’s petition goes further, attempting to pick apart, at length, key pieces of evidence used against the family: dog hair DNA analysis, comparisons of cinders and concrete, grasses, buttons and rivets.

“In the early 2000s, this so-called evidence was presented as new and novel scientific evidence,” IIP attorneys wrote in court filings. “Now, more than two decades later, this ‘evidence’ could only be considered new or novel because it was not, in fact, based on any real or existing science.”

IIP attorneys asked an Elgin-based laboratory to review Munroe’s work on the case, which the lab’s scientists concluded was flawed at “every level of the scientific process.”

“Peaks in X-ray diffraction” used by the Canadian geologists to match concrete samples from the Slovers car lot to concrete found with Karyn’s remains were, the lab’s scientists wrote in a report, “just peaks of some of the most common minerals used in concrete in Illinois.”

A research geneticist commissioned by the IIP examined case files from Halverson’s DNA testing of dog hair found with Karyn’s remains and concluded that her analysis linking that hair to hair from one of the Slovers’ dogs “appears to be plagued by several problems.”

“Even two decades ago,” the geneticist wrote, “several major issues with (Halverson’s) analysis should have prevented the admission of her canine DNA evidence.”

Halverson’s work in three other criminal cases faced similar criticism, IIP attorneys noted.

Munroe could not be reached for comment. Halverson, 69 and retired, said her lab used the best available resources for what was then the nascent field of animal DNA testing.

To criticize her work all these years later, she said, is akin to criticizing NASA for once sending astronauts to space without modern computers.

“Do I stand by my results? Absolutely,” she said. “But if they want to impugn them because of the lack of bells and whistles, so be it.”

The IIP petition also accused Macon County prosecutors of using false testimony and inflammatory closing arguments to convict the family; similar allegations led to new trials in two other Macon County criminal cases a year earlier.

During the Slover trial, the defense team tried to poke holes in the state’s theory that Karyn was killed at the Slovers’ car lot. To do so, they called more than one person who testified to seeing the Pontiac and its unique CADS 7 plate between 5:25 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. the Friday she disappeared, in locations miles east of Miracle Motors.

But those witnesses said the car they saw had lightly tinted windows. And the state put Swann on the stand to testify, more than once, that his car’s windows were clear.

Two IIP volunteers later tracked down the car’s current owner and records from General Motors, both of which confirmed that the Pontiac did have lightly tinted windows, just as witnesses testified.

Another piece of Swann’s trial testimony drew the ire of IIP attorneys. He told the court he first learned that Karyn’s purse was found in his Pontiac when he got to the stretch of interstate where it had been abandoned that Friday night and, he added, he was unable to share that information with Karyn’s parents.

And yet, after Michael Jr. spoke by phone to his mom that same night, he told a bar co-worker that Karyn was missing and her purse was left in the abandoned car.

How could the younger Slover have known about the purse, the state asked, unless his parents killed her?

But, a phone transcript included with the family’s petition shows that Swann was told about the purse when a Piatt County dispatcher first called him to say his car was found.

Additional phone records filed with the petition reveal that he and Karyn’s parents exchanged two separate phone calls less than 30 minutes after Swann spoke to the dispatcher, followed quickly by a third call from the bar where Michael Jr. worked to Karyn’s parents.

“This evidence is critical in explaining how Michael Slover Jr. would know that Karyn’s purse had been found with the car,” IIP attorneys wrote.

The state’s closing arguments, alone, merit a new trial, IIP attorneys said. At one point, prosecutor Richard Current compared the dog hair DNA analysis with the DNA testing done eight months earlier to identify 9/11 terrorist attack victims. He also suggested that Karyn could not have been killed by a stranger because there was no evidence of a sexual assault and she was “a very attractive lady.”

Part 7: The alternative suspects

There is also a question in the minds of IIP attorneys about what the jury did not hear during the trial.

Around 4:30 a.m. on the day Karyn’s remains were found in Lake Shelbyville, a police officer in the tiny village of Grant Park, about 20 miles northeast of Kankakee, pulled over a Ford Mustang with three people inside, records included in the family’s petition show.

The officer stood near the driver’s side door and spoke with the driver. Meanwhile, a Suzuki that had been traveling with the Ford continued down the street for a block, then turned back toward the officer, sped across the lane divider and struck the officer before smashing into his squad car.

Both the officer and the Suzuki’s driver were taken to the hospital. Authorities learned the Ford had been reported stolen three days earlier in Effingham, about 60 miles south of Decatur.

There had been a second man in the Suzuki who, authorities were later told, grabbed his gun from under the passenger seat and bailed before the car hit the officer.

Three days after the Grant Park crash, the names of the Suzuki’s two occupants would surface in a tip about Karyn’s murder.

A police officer in Charleston, 55 miles southeast of Decatur, met with a source who had been told that the Suzuki’s two occupants and a third man stole a car from the Charleston area and drove to Decatur because one of them knew Karyn and wanted to see her. The man who knew Karyn raped her while the other two held her down and then shot her in the head, the source told the officer. The three dismembered her body, put her remains in garbage bags and dumped them in a lake because they noted how long it took authorities to find an Eastern Illinois University student who had recently drowned.

Records in the IIP court filing show that investigators received at least two similar tips identifying the Suzuki’s two occupants as being two of the three men responsible for Karyn’s murder.

Investigators searched both cars involved in the Grant Park incident, collecting hairs and fibers from the Ford. They also searched a Champaign motel room that the men reportedly rented for two nights, Sept. 26 and 27 — the last two days Karyn was seen alive. They found no evidence connecting them to her murder, and the fingerprint found on the Lake Shelbyville bridge was not left by either man.

Four years after the Slovers were found guilty, the man tipsters said fired the shots that killed Karyn was convicted in Tennessee on three counts of statutory rape of a 14-year-old.

That means his DNA could be in the national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS for short), an FBI-maintained database that contains more than 20 million DNA profiles.

But, IIP attorneys said, authorities have not entered the new DNA evidence from the Slover case into that database for any matches.

Part 8: ‘Who would do this?’

Michael Slover Jr. walked out of Robinson Correctional Center on March 15 of this year, paroled after 24 years behind bars. His mother’s projected parole date is in three more years.

About three weeks after Michael Jr.’s release, IIP attorneys filed into a Macon County courtroom for the first of what will likely be many hearings in their effort to overturn the family’s conviction. Before the next court date in July, they expect to have more DNA testing results they said would further prove the Slovers’ innocence.

“This would be almost the culmination of my career work with the project, with a belief that this injustice had been done,” Golden said. “I actually hope that I will be around to see some remedy to this.”

As for Kolten, the 3-year-old who became the crux of the prosecution’s case against his father and grandparents would eventually find himself at the center of another bitter court battle, this one a custody dispute between his aunt, Mary Slover, who legally adopted her nephew months before her family’s arrests, and Karyn’s parents, Larry and Donna Hearn.

In the end, the Hearns were awarded custody of Kolten, who is now approaching his 31st birthday.

Melany Jackson, Karyn’s friend and colleague, remains certain of the Slovers’ guilt. Now living in Colorado Springs, she said she did not intend to read the family’s latest court filing.

“Whatever evidence they’re going to put forth, I already know in my heart what happened,” she said. “I’m not interested in any efforts for them to be exonerated.”

Thomas, the former sheriff who took part in the initial investigation, said the evidence against the Slovers remains “overwhelming.”

“If not the Slovers,” he asked, “then who would do this?”

The lawsuit, filed Thursday by the group Judicial Watch, names as plaintiffs six people whose relatives once lived in Evanston during a 50-year period of housing discrimination that often deprived Black residents from building wealth through homeownership and kept them segregated to a tiny enclave on the city’s western edge.

None of the plaintiffs or their relatives identify as Black, the lawsuit says.

Attorneys for the six plaintiffs argue that the program awards applicants $25,000 based on their race, without having to prove they or their relatives faced housing discrimination. As such, they argue, the reparations program violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which says all Americans are given equal protection under the law.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Tribune that Evanston’s program is “just a proxy for giving out money to people based on race.”

“It looks to me like Evanston wants to be on the cutting edge,” Fitton said. “We don’t want those anti-discrimination protections to be upended through these types of programs. It’s important this be corrected as soon as possible so other states, localities and the federal government don’t go down this path of doling out tax money to individuals simply based on race.”

Evanston spokesperson Cynthia Vargas said the city would not comment on the litigation but would “vehemently defend any lawsuit brought against our city’s Reparations Program.”

The six named plaintiffs are Margot Flinn, Carol Johnson, Stasys Neimanas, Stephen Weiland, Barbara Regard and Henry Regard. But the lawsuit seeks to establish a class of eligible plaintiffs that could number in the tens of thousands. Fitton estimated the total damages could exceed $1 billion. The lawsuit also asks the court to prevent the city from using race as an eligibility requirement for the program, which as of May 2 has paid out in excess of $4.5 million in reparations, meeting minutes show.

Flinn, 82, who currently lives in Florida, said three generations of her family lived in Evanston and did not experience housing discrimination. Despite this, she is concerned what the potential tax implications could be as the program expands.

“There’s no free lunch in the world,” she said. “The money’s got to come from somebody.”

Weiland, a first cousin to Flinn, has lived within the same 30-mile radius his entire life and currently resides in Lake Forest. He made deliveries for his father, who owned a flower shop in Evanston on Sherman Avenue even after the family moved to Skokie. His grandfather also lived in Evanston, making him a third-generation Evanstonian.

Reparations are not the way to go with helping those in need, according to Weiland, who said he considers them handouts. Instead, he argues funding should be put toward bettering local school systems and programs to provide jobs.

“That’s the key to lifting up people in this country,” Weiland said. “Handouts don’t work. I don’t believe in handouts.”

If the case is won on his behalf, Weiland said he would be donating the money to several Catholic private schools in Chicagoland that focus on serving underprivileged youth.

Beyond housing, the Evanston Reparations Committee is also exploring other avenues through working groups centered on education initiatives, economic development and community unity.

The program was designed to provide $25,000 payments for Black Evanstonians who were affected by racial housing policies put in place by the city. Recipients were initially able to use the funding for housing expenses including the purchase of a new home, down payment on a mortgage or for use in home improvements.

The program was expanded in March 2023 to allow for direct cash payments after siblings Kenneth and Shelia Wideman were selected to receive benefits but could not use the money for housing purposes.

Those eligible for the program fall into one of three groups; ancestors who were Evanston residents at least 18 years of age between 1919 and 1969, direct descendants of those ancestors, and current residents who can show they have experienced housing discrimination after 1969 due to city policies.

Funding for the program has been pulled from recreational cannabis sales tax as well as an additional $1 million annually from real estate transfer tax revenues for the next 10 years.

As of the May 2 Reparations Committee meeting, 129 ancestors have received money, with a majority selecting direct cash payments. The committee has since moved on to disbursing funds to the direct descendant group, comprising 454 people, and expects to send payments to about 80 people a year.

This is the second legal battle between Evanston and Justice Watch. In 2021, it sued the city in Cook County court over public records related to the fledgling reparations program. The suit was later dismissed. It’s also mounted legal challenges against race-based initiatives in San Francisco and Minneapolis, among other locations.

The 14th Amendment clause was used recently to strike down a Cook County grant program for small businesses. The suit was filed by the California-based Pacific Legal Foundation.

Judicial Watch describes itself on its website as a “conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law.” Fitton has been a frequent speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The organization has filed lawsuits on a variety of issues including one in California to force the removal of ineligible voters to the rolls and an amicus brief regarding its opposition to the abortion drug mifepristone.

In a notice dated Friday, the director of the university’s Office for Student Conflict Resolution wrote that the investigator in the probe did not have access to the complainant, the complainant’s witness or the complete file from the police department in Lawrence, Kansas.

“The complainant has not indicated an intent to participate in a hearing before a hearing panel at this time,” the director, Robert Wilczynski, wrote in the letter. “As a result, the process has concluded.” No disciplinary action will be taken at this time, he added.

Shannon’s attorney, Robert Lang, said Shannon fully cooperated with the university’s investigation and is “looking forward to graduating with a sociology degree in May. That’s always been important to him.”

A university spokesperson declined to comment, citing federal privacy laws.

Shannon, 23, faces one count of rape or an alternative count of misdemeanor sexual battery in a case that stems from a September trip he and two others took to watch the Illini football team play the University of Kansas.

Lawrence police said in an affidavit that a woman, born in 2005, told a detective that Shannon put his hand under her skirt, grabbed her buttocks and penetrated her with his finger while at a crowded bar near the Kansas campus.

Shannon has denied the allegations. A preliminary hearing in his Douglas County, Kansas, criminal case is scheduled for May 10.

A first-team All-Big Ten selection this season and last, he was second in the conference in scoring at the time of his six-game suspension. Shannon sued the university over that suspension, and a federal judge on Jan. 19 granted a preliminary injunction returning Shannon to the team. His attorneys moved to voluntarily dismiss that federal lawsuit in the wake of the Office for Student Conflict Resolution’s decision.

The fifth-year guard went on to lead the Illini to a Big Ten Tournament championship — being named Most Outstanding Player in the process — and a trip to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight, where he and his teammates were trounced by eventual champion Connecticut 77-52.

Shannon was named a third-team All-American this season. Some NBA draft prognosticators had him as a first-round pick before his arrest.

The university could reopen its investigation, Wilczynski wrote in the notice, “if new substantial evidence is brought to the attention of (the Office for Student Conflict Resolution) from any source.” The school’s Title IX coordinator also could review the decision to conclude the investigation, he added, if requested to do so by either party.

The Tribune’s Tracy Greer contributed.

She had just finished a particularly grueling 16-month stretch in which she logged close to 300 hours inside Lake County emergency rooms, where she took on the arduous task of trying to help survivors in the immediate aftermath of a sexual assault.

After nearly 26 years with the Zacharias Sexual Abuse Center in Gurnee, first as a volunteer and then as an advocacy services specialist, the 58-year-old Skokie native had reached a breaking point.

I need to have a life, she thought. I can’t keep this pace up.

Across Illinois, scores of direct service providers like Lubel who work at the state’s 31 rape crisis centers are struggling under the weight of crushing workloads, stagnant wages and unsteady job security. Those pressures have intensified in recent months, advocates say, after a key source of federal funding was essentially slashed in half, a loss of around $9.5 million.

Survivor advocates say the fallout from cuts to federal Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) grants has been severe: A little over half of the state’s crisis centers have reduced staffing or frozen hiring, according to the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

Five crisis center satellite offices have closed. Fourteen hospitals in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs no longer receive round-the-clock emergency crisis center responses when survivors arrive in the ER. Wait lists for counseling appointments have grown longer at some centers while others have turned to community fundraising just to keep existing services intact.

All this has put the state’s crisis centers on pace to serve an estimated 1,400 fewer survivors or their families this fiscal year compared with the last, ICASA said.

With the potential for more federal funding shortfalls looming on the horizon and COVID-19 relief dollars expected to dry up soon, survivor advocates have turned to Illinois lawmakers for help. Last spring, their efforts helped persuade the state’s Department of Human Services to earmark about $5 million in federal grant money, separate from VOCA, for crisis centers.

Advocates say more is needed. Last week, crisis center staffers from around Illinois filled the Capitol rotunda in Springfield to rally support for a requested $12 million increase in state funding, money they say will blunt the impact of federal VOCA cuts, ease the burden on front-line workers and, ultimately, ensure the work of crisis centers can continue.

“It’s essential that services be there when survivors need them,” said Carrie Ward, the coalition’s CEO.

But with about two months left in the legislative session, squeezing money from an already tight state budget could be a challenge, as lawmakers face pressure to aid asylum-seekers arriving in the state and the ever-present push for more education dollars and more funding for local governments.

Still, crisis center leaders say the consequences of inaction will be devastating to survivors, their families and their communities.

“The broad-reach impact of sexual violence permeates every aspect of our society,” said Anne Pezzillo, vice president of clinical services at YWCA Metropolitan Chicago. “If a survivor at one of their most vulnerable moments can’t get that support, and can’t get supported from trauma therapists specifically trained to work exclusively with this population, that just sounds unimaginable to me.”

‘Being there made a world of difference’

Lubel can still remember the first time she went by herself to a hospital to help a survivor.

It was 1998. She was living in Gurnee and working as a special education teacher when, motivated by a desire to give back, she answered a newspaper ad seeking volunteers for the Zacharias Center (then called the Lake County Council Against Sexual Assault).

She sat through the training — then 60 hours, largely role-playing scenarios — and signed up to answer crisis line calls and medical calls from emergency rooms.

Three months later, she fielded her first three medical calls, all in the same 12-hour shift.

“What I remember about that was the inequities in the hospitals,” she said. “This was the late ’90s. Every hospital was a completely different experience for the survivor.”

In one hospital ER, she spoke with a 16-year-old girl who, Lubel learned, said she’d been given alcohol by someone older than her, and then assaulted. The nurse, Lubel remembered, told the girl a forensic medical exam was not necessary because the encounter appeared to be consensual.

Lubel stepped outside to call her supervisor to confirm what she suspected. Then she pulled the nurse aside. The guy was older, she told the nurse. He gave her alcohol. There was nothing consensual about what happened. If she wants the exam, do it.

Lubel stayed with the girl during the exam and helped calm her anxiety over talking to her parents, who were en route to the hospital.

Later that night, Lubel drove to a different hospital, where she met a woman in her early 20s who said she met a guy through a dating service who assaulted her at his house. The nurse there calmly explained the entire exam process to the young woman while Lubel sat by her side.

By around midnight, Lubel was home, and the reality of what she’d just witnessed started to crystalize.

“I felt like each call was a success in terms of supporting the survivor,” she said. “If I can make it just a little easier for somebody, then I’ve done what I needed to do. The woman in her 20s was alone. Being there made a world of difference. Getting the (exam) done for that 16-year-old and helping her talk to her parents made a difference.”

Over the years, there would be many more phone calls that required Lubel to put her life on hold and rush to the hospital, and she learned to absorb and process the trauma she saw and heard in those emergency rooms.

‘A perfect storm in many ways’

Funding for rape crisis centers is not a new concern in Illinois. Back in 2008, centers braced for a possible $5.2 million hit to their budgets as part of larger state social services cuts proposed by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Reports at the time said the disgraced former governor reversed course when he learned that the centers, then numbering 33, were expected to lose about $1.4 million in federal funding.

A few years later, the state passed a so-called skin tax on strip clubs — $3 per customer or an amount based on gross receipts — to help pay for sexual assault survivor services. That tax has consistently fallen well below the projected $1 million it was expected to generate, state records show.

By 2015, the state became embroiled in what would become a two-year budget impasse that caused disruptions to social service programs across Illinois, including crisis centers.

With state Department of Human Services funding holding relatively flat at a little over $7.5 million a year for the last 20 years, crisis centers historically lean on federal dollars to help pay for their operations.

One of those key sources is VOCA. Money from fines, penalties, special assessments and bond forfeitures in federal criminal cases is deposited into a fund, and a cap is set on how much can be distributed to states to pay for victim assistance programs, including rape crisis centers.

That cap has dropped nearly every year since 2018, records show, from about $4.4 billion down to $1.9 billion in fiscal 2023. Advocates such as Terri Poore, policy director at the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, say the decline is the result of historically low deposits to the fund due, in part, to declining federal prosecutions.

“Historically, there would be bigger white-collar federal criminal cases resulting in big deposits in the fund,” she said. “Obviously no one wants white collar crime to happen. But if it happens, it’s good that crime victims benefit.”

All this has played out amid a recent uptick in the estimated number of people raped or sexually assaulted in the United States.

The VOCA fund’s distribution cap for the current fiscal year, which began in October, was proposed at $1.2 billion. Poore said that number has since climbed to around $1.3 billion. Still, that’s a loss of $600 million.

“Even before any of this happened, many of our programs had a waiting list for counseling services,” she said. “The infrastructure of sexual assault services in the country has not been where it needs to be, and yet there are these major cuts coming.”

Poore’s organization conducted a national survey of survivor programs last year and found that more than half lost staffing, while a third reported sizable wait lists for services such as counseling and support groups.

All are bracing for the possibility of further VOCA reductions next year.

“It really is a perfect storm in many ways,” she said. “With less support, with advocates really stretched and programs saying I might have to lose a satellite office or close our doors, that has a real emotional and economic impact on a community, in addition to individual people and their families.”

‘There’s just no wiggle room’

Early last year, the state’s sexual assault coalition learned that VOCA reductions would essentially slash crisis center funding in Illinois from nearly $19 million to about $9.5 million.

About 100 miles southwest of Chicago in Streator, VOCA cuts forced the crisis center Safe Journeys to lose a staff member who coordinated volunteers and managed cases for sexual violence survivors in LaSalle and Livingston counties.

Those case management duties have been spread among other staffers, said executive director Susan Bursztynsky, “but at this point in time, we can’t go out and advertise for volunteers or go to colleges and fairs seeking interns.”

Down in Danville, Survivor Resource Center Executive Director Marcie Sheridan said her organization lost a counselor and closed a satellite office in Georgetown, about 10 miles south of its main location. The recently secured $5 million federal grant from the state DHS prevented deeper cuts to its counseling services and medical advocacy work, Sheridan said.

“Right now, there’s just no wiggle room,” she said.

The state’s largest rape crisis center, YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, lost a little over $1.8 million in VOCA funding this fiscal year, said Pezzillo, the agency’s vice president of clinical services.

The resulting cuts were painful: Three case managers, three clinical team members and nine medical advocates were let go. The number of hospitals the agency could serve fell from 21 to nine.

The losses could have been worse, Pezzillo said, if not for the agency’s efforts to find other grant dollars, including one awarded this month that she said should help YWCA build back some of its programs and staffing.

“It’s this almost constant search for new funding, which puts a strain on staff from a grant compliance perspective,” she said. “It’s more quarterly and fiscal reports and client stories, which is ultimately helping us do the work we all want to do. But it gets to be exhausting to be constantly in search of more funding when we’re worried about when the next ax is going to fall.”

That’s why survivor advocates, numbering well over 300, converged on Springfield last week. Their request: boost the state general fund budget for crisis centers to $20 million in the next fiscal year.

“It’s been much too long since we’ve received an increase in general revenue funding, and the time to change that is now,” Ward, the ICASA leader, told the crowd, many dressed in teal and holding signs that read: “Believe survivors,” “Sexual assault is everyone’s problem” or “Girls just wanna have fun-ding!”

Among the lawmakers who spoke at the rally, state Sen. Robert Peters, a Chicago Democrat, said he was tired of people using sexual assault survivors and victims as talking points.

“I’m proud to say I’m not here to use this as a talking point, but put my money where my mouth is,” Peters said. “You all do some of the hardest work. You’re pushed to the brink. You have to be presented or live through trauma over and over again. It is our job to have your back.”

‘We’re all being overworked’

For Genesis Vasquez, that help can’t come fast enough.

Two years ago, she took a job as a citizenship and immigrant resources supervisor at Mujeres Latinas en Acción, a nonprofit community service organization in Pilsen. A year later, she shifted to the organization’s sexual assault survivor program.

At Vasquez’s organization, two staff positions were cut as a result of VOCA reductions, and her list of responsibilities grew to include overseeing medical advocacy, training, prevention education, outreach and intakes.

“We’re all being overworked,” she said. “We’re all doing multiple tasks. It makes it very hard because sometimes it feels like there’s not enough work hours to do what you’re supposed to finish.”

Like many who work in the field, Vasquez, 25, is also a survivor. Every time someone reaches out needing help, she risks reliving her own trauma.

“When you’re a survivor, it’s even harder because it feels like everything around you is surrounded by this topic,” she said. “It’s hard to get that break or ask for that help too.”

Recently, she said she’s found herself feeling irritable, depressed and burned out.

“I’m at a point where I really don’t know where to go from here,” she said. “I’m trying to work on self-care outside of work, not taking work home, not working through lunch, trying to have more clear boundaries. I feel like that’s very difficult. In what I’ve been through, I’m not a person who does well with boundaries.”

Over in Gurnee, Lubel has also struggled with that boundary. She’s tried to take time off after long stretches of work, but, she added, “there aren’t staff for the job.”

Volunteers have picked up more medical shifts, she said. Last month, of the nine calls Zacharias Center fielded about survivors at hospital emergency rooms, Lubel went to three.

On the wall next to her desk at the center’s Gurnee office, there’s a framed, handwritten letter. Nearly 20 years ago, Lubel was called to a hospital in Libertyville. An 18-year-old woman had been jogging on a bike path when she was raped by a convicted sex offender who then slashed her throat and left her for dead.

Even now, Lubel struggles to talk about what she saw in the emergency room that day. But she remembers being amazed by the family’s resilience and that the young woman, lying in a hospital bed with stitches in her throat, thought to ask her mom to call the paramedics and thank them for saving her life.

“I also remember coming home from that one and feeling awful,” Lubel said. “I didn’t do anything.”

About a month later, the woman’s parents sent Lubel the letter that hangs on her office wall.

“Your gentle kindness and wise counsel helped us find a strength beyond our own that day,” they wrote her. “It is a wonderful gift that you offer in a fearful time.”

Street Cop Training was slated to hold training classes in five Illinois communities between April and November: Burr Ridge, Cary, Elgin, Mount Vernon and Rochelle. Burr Ridge and Rochelle have since canceled classes. And Elgin has said its officers will not attend the company’s training.

The company’s courses are not certified by the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, state officials said, meaning any officers who attended those classes would not receive continuing education credits.

In December, the New Jersey Office of the State Comptroller released a scathing report centered on a six-day training conference Street Cop held in Atlantic City in October 2021. Nearly 1,000 officers from departments across the country attended the conference, the report states, where they heard instructors who “promoted the use of unconstitutional policing tactics for motor vehicle stops,” and “glorified violence and an excessively militaristic or ‘warrior’ approach to policing.”

The agency’s report counted “over 100 discriminatory and harassing remarks by speakers and instructors, with repeated references to speakers’ genitalia, lewd gestures and demeaning quips about women and minorities.”

“We found so many examples of so many instructors promoting views and tactics that were wildly inappropriate, offensive, discriminatory, harassing, and, in some cases, likely illegal,” Kevin Walsh, acting state comptroller, said in a release announcing the report. “The fact that the training undermined nearly a decade of police reforms — and New Jersey dollars paid for it — is outrageous.”

Street Cop did not respond to a Chicago Tribune email seeking comment for this story. The company, once based in New Jersey, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Florida, where it relocated, according to a company Facebook post.

“Rather than spend time in the past we look forward to our future and ensuring that the people of this country get a better police officer to serve and protect them,” the post reads. “Yea we cursed at our event and told jokes. But to this day even after further review there is still nothing supporting any claims of 4th Amendment wrong doings or racial unfairness.”

Burr Ridge police Chief John Madden said two of his officers attended Street Cop training classes, one in 2022 and the other in 2023, and told the chief they saw none of the behavior documented in the New Jersey report. One of those officers recommended the department host a Street Cop training class, which had been scheduled for November. Doing so would allow a certain number of Burr Ridge officers to attend for free, depending on how many officers from outside agencies purchased $299 tickets.

The class was supposed to be taught by an Indiana police sergeant who, according to the New Jersey comptroller report, espoused potentially unconstitutional traffic stop tactics during his presentation at the Atlantic City conference.

Madden said another officer flagged the New Jersey report shortly after its release in December.

“Extremely disturbing,” he said of the report. “We’re talking about unconstitutional practices, discriminatory conduct. We’re not sending our officers to anything like that.”

Some Burr Ridge residents were outraged to learn about the classes.

“Residents deserve assurance that no more public money will be spent on these disturbing police training tactics that expose our village to potentially expensive litigation and which places our officers at risk,” Burr Ridge resident Patricia Davis wrote in an email to Madden, the mayor and the Village Board.

Madden said no public money would have been spent on the training and that his staff repeatedly tried to speak with someone at Street Cop to ask, in part, if the company had taken any steps to correct the myriad issues raised in the comptroller’s report. When no one responded, Madden  instructed a deputy chief to inform the company that Burr Ridge would no longer host the class or send its officers to it, he said.

“Moving forward, we’ve got nothing to do with this company,” Madden said, “If you have a private company providing law enforcement training, as chiefs we really have to vet the companies.”

The class Burr Ridge planned to host, called “Interdiction Mastermind,” is also scheduled to be held April 4 in Cary with the same Indiana sergeant as instructor, according to the company’s website.

Cary police Chief Patrick Finlon did not respond to a message seeking comment, nor did Chief Trent Page in Mount Vernon, 280 miles south of Chicago, where a different instructor’s class is scheduled for June 11.

A Street Cop class on Illinois case law, taught by an attorney and police corporal in Crown Point, Indiana, is scheduled to be held Aug. 26 in Elgin.

Elgin Police Department spokesman, Sgt. Mike Martino, said the department is not the host agency for that class and will not have any officers in attendance. He declined to answer additional questions.

About 80 miles west of Chicago, in Rochelle, Chief Pete Pavia said his officers asked a few months ago if the department would consider hosting a Street Cop training class. A class taught by the company’s founder, former New Jersey police Officer Dennis Benigno, was scheduled for July 15.

Yesterday, Pavia said he canceled the class after learning from a state law enforcement training official that his officers would not receive credit for the session.

“I was told it had something to do with them filing bankruptcy,” Pavia said, adding that he was unaware of the New Jersey comptroller report before speaking with a Chicago Tribune reporter.

“I’m glad I canceled this class,” Pavia said. “Had I known this, I wouldn’t have considered hosting a class for them in the first place.”

In the future, he continued, “when someone brings a class, I’ll look more into it.”

The Associated Press called the race for Davis, who was first elected to Congress in 1996, about an hour after polls closed.

“This election is over and the victory belongs to the people,” Davis declared at his election night party at the Westside Baptist Ministers Conference.

Two years after surviving the most competitive primary of his congressional career, Davis easily defeated a field of rivals that included Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin and third-time opponent Kina Collins.

With about three-fourths of the vote counted, Davis led with 53% over Conyears-Ervin’s 22% and Collins’ 18%, according to unofficial results.

Collins, a progressive activist, lost to Davis by 6 points in 2022, which helped inspire Conyears-Ervin, a one-time Davis ally, and newcomers Nikhil Bhatia and Kouri Marshall to enter this year’s race. Bhatia and Marshall had collected only a small share of the vote, according to unofficial results.

Davis was among four congressional Democrats from the Chicago area to easily hold off primary challenges Tuesday.

Progressive Southwest Side Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García defeated Ald. Raymond López, 15th, a more conservative member of the Chicago City Council, in the 4th District, and Rep. Sean Casten of Downers Grove turned back two challengers in the largely west and south suburban 6th District, according to the AP.

Moderate Rep. Bill Foster of Naperville defeated Naperville civil rights attorney Qaism Rashid in the suburban 11th District, according to the AP.

Throughout his campaign, Davis argued that his seniority and the relationships he’s forged in Washington over nearly three decades are a boon for residents in the district, which stretches from the lakefront through western suburbs and takes in large swaths of the West and South sides of Chicago.

In his trademark booming bass voice, Davis in his victory speech Tuesday tweaked “the prognosticators” who suggested he could lose the primary.

“All of those who thought my community wouldn’t remember the work we’ve done all of my adult life? I am so affirmed,” he said.

While Davis’ relatively narrow margin of victory in 2022 exposed potential vulnerability, Conyears-Ervin’s campaign was dogged by allegations of ethical misconduct at City Hall. The Board of Ethics in November found probable cause that Conyears-Ervin had violated the city ethics code by firing two employees who had complained about her conduct.

Davis, No. 24 on the congressional seniority list and a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, had the backing of much of the Democratic establishment in Chicago and Illinois, including Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.

While some observers saw those endorsements as a sign of Davis’ reelection struggles, the congressman said they were merely reciprocating his support for them.

“Let me tell you, I helped make the big guns,” he said. “I would expect the big guns to come in.”

Conyears-Ervin was backed by a number of politically active Black church leaders and by the powerful Chicago Teachers Union.

Sidestepping questions about the ethics allegations she’s faced, Conyears-Ervin, the wife of 28th Ward Ald. Jason Ervin, emphasized that she was “the only working mother” in the five-way race.

On Tuesday, Conyears-Ervin arrived at her campaign party at Manny’s Cafeteria and Delicatessen around 8:20 p.m. to a standing ovation from her supporters. With her husband at her side, she congratulated Davis.

“For me to be able to fight for working families, to raise issues that have never been raised, my heart is full,” she told the crowd.

Conyears-Ervin repeatedly referenced her 7-year-old daughter in her speech, saying, “I won this morning when that 7-year-old girl saw a Black woman on the ballot for United States Congress.”

Collins fought an uphill battle in her third congressional bid, lacking the outside progressive backing that boosted her 2022 campaign. She also faced a late flurry of attack ads and mailers put out by a pro-Israel political action committee spurred to action by her pro-Palestinian stances.

As of Saturday, the United Democracy Project had reported spending more than $494,000 opposing Collins’ candidacy, federal campaign finance records show.

Collins, who arrived at her election night party about an hour after the race had been called for Davis, encouraged her supporters to not “stop doing the work.”  But  she didn’t address the question of whether she’d run again.

“Maybe I’m not the right candidate for this seat, but this is the right time,” she said.

Collins said forces working against her this cycle included “voter apathy” that led to low turnout.

In November, Davis will defend his seat in the heavily Democratic district against the lone name on Tuesday’s Republican primary ballot, perennial candidate Chad Koppie, who resides outside the district in far northwest suburban Gilberts.

Davis would not say whether this would be his final term, saying there were several younger state lawmakers that he could see himself supporting in future elections. However, he said he can do more for his community given his Congressional experience than anybody.

“If you know how to do it and you know how to get it done, than it’s almost a dereliction of duty not to serve,” he said.

4th Congressional District

In the 4th District, García won his first contested Democratic primary since being elected to Congress in 2018 to succeed longtime Rep. Luis Gutiérrez.

Challenging the progressive incumbent from the right was López, who won a third term representing the 15th Ward in 2023.

With 59% of the vote counted, Garcia had 69% to 31% for Lopez, according to unofficial results.

Immigration and the ongoing migrant crisis were key issues for the race in the Latino-majority 4th Congressional District.

Both candidates are from the Southwest Side, which makes up a significant portion of the district, and each had eyes on the mayor’s office in last year’s election.

García finished fourth in the first round of voting, failing to advance to the April runoff. It was his second unsuccessful mayoral bid after losing to Rahm Emanuel in the 2015 runoff.

López ended up running to retain his City Council seat after announcing a mayoral bid.

An ally of Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor, García was elected to the City Council in 1986 and the Illinois Senate in 1992, becoming the first Mexican American Illinois state senator.

After losing his state Senate seat in a 1998 primary, García was elected to the Cook County Board in 2010, serving two terms before being all but anointed as Gutiérrez’s successor in Washington.

The at-times bombastic López, a frequent Fox News guest known for his outspoken criticisms of mayors Lori Lightfoot and Brandon Johnson and their policies, argued that his more moderate approach is in better line with voters in the district.

Redrawn after the 2020 census to include new suburban communities, the district now stretches from Chicago’s Southwest Side into Cicero and west as far as Oak Brook and Hinsdale in DuPage County, then north to Melrose Park and Northlake in suburban Cook County.

In his victory speech, Garcia stressed the need for stricter gun control, including a ban on assault weapons, and for “fixing our broken immigration system.”

He said people in this country should be able to “live with peace of mind, whether they came 35 years ago or only a few weeks ago.”

There was no candidate on the Republican primary ballot in the largely Democratic district, making García the probable victor in November.

11th Congressional District

In the suburban and exurban 11th District, Foster, who often notes he’s the “only physicist in Congress,” defeated progressive challenger Rashid, who previously ran unsuccessfully for public office in Virginia, including a congressional bid in 2020.

With 84% of the vote counted, Foster had 77% to 23% for Rashid, according to unofficial results.

Like other progressives challenging incumbent Chicago-area Democrats this year, Rashid made calls for an immediate and permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war a central theme of his campaign.

Rashid also champions universal health care and other progressive causes.

Foster, who first came to Congress in 2008 through a special election to replace Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, has supported Israel’s right to defend itself following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack but also has said he’s “deeply alarmed by Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza and his disregard for the loss of civilian life.”

He’s called for a stop in fighting to allow the release of hostages and the delivery of humanitarian aid.

On health care, Foster has said universal coverage should be achieved through further expansion of the Affordable Care Act.

Foster, who had no primary opponent in 2022, defeated conservative Republican Catalina Lauf of Woodstock in that year’s general election by nearly 13 points.

After losing his seat for one term in the Tea Party wave of 2010, Foster, a former Fermilab scientist, won it back in 2012 and has held on since.

Redrawn after the 2020 census, the district now sweeps from the western part of Lake County as far west as Belvidere and south through McHenry, Kane and DuPage counties to Bolingbrook and Lemont, taking in parts of Aurora and Naperville.

“While we celebrate tonight’s victory, we have no time to waste to get back to work, especially with so much at stake for our nation,” Foster said in a statement. “Republicans are gearing up to target the district once again so they can pass a nationwide abortion ban, block sensible gun safety legislation, gut the ACA, pollute the environment and roll back so much of the progress we’ve made over the past few years.”

In the November general election, Foster will take on Jerry Evans, whom the AP declared the winner of a three-way race on the Republican primary ballot.

Those vying for the GOP nomination include Jerry Evans, O. Kent Mercado and Susan Hathaway-Altman.

With 84% of the vote counted, Evans led with 51%, Hathaway-Altman’s 37% and Mercado’s 12%, according to unofficial results.

Evans, of Warrenville, owns a Wheaton music school, and his campaign website describes him as “a Christian, husband, father, and political outsider.”

Evans finished second, behind Lauf, in the district’s 2022 six-way Republican primary with nearly 23% of the vote.

Also running again this year was Hathaway-Altman, of Geneva, who finished fourth with 12% of the vote. On her campaign website, Hathaway-Altman says she’s worked in “financial and travel related services” and if elected “will protect us from all of the external forces drawing us into Socialism, or worse, Communism and even a New World Order.”

Mercado, a podiatrist and attorney from Bartlett, has emphasized “kitchen table issues,” such as affordable health care.

6th Congressional District

Casten easily dispatched Mahnoor Ahmad of Oakbrook Terrace and Charles Hughes of Chicago in Tuesday’s Democratic primary in the largely suburban 6th District as he seeks a fourth term.

With 75% of the vote counted, Casten led with 77% of the vote over Ahmad, with 14%, and Hughes, with 9%, according to unofficial results.

The former owner of a clean energy business, Casten has made taking on climate change a pillar of his tenure in Washington. He’s also campaigned heavily on protecting reproductive rights.

Ahmad challenged Casten from the left. She supports a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war, the Green New Deal and “Medicare for All.”

Hughes, from Chicago’s Garfield Ridge neighborhood near Midway Airport, was a precinct worker for former longtime U.S. Rep. Bill Lipinski. He finished third in the 2022 Democratic primary, trailing Casten and Newman with just over 3% of the vote.

Casten, who unseated six-term Republican Rep. Peter Roskam in 2018 to take over the seat once held by conservative icon Henry Hyde, bested freshman U.S. Rep. Marie Newman of La Grange in the Democratic primary two years ago in the state’s only incumbent-on-incumbent Democratic congressional primary.

In the 2022 general election, Casten defeated Orland Park Mayor Keith Pekau, a Republican who gained notoriety for challenging state COVID-19 mandates and aligned himself with the far-right group Awake Illinois.

The 6th District includes stretches from west suburban Lombard southeast to south suburban Tinley Park, taking in Chicago’s Beverly and Mount Greenwood neighborhoods and areas near Midway.

Casten will face Republican Niki Conforti of Glen Ellyn in the Nov. 5 general election.