From snarled tollways to blood-stained sidewalks, September 29 exposed the contradictions of life in Chicago.
September 29, 2025 — A deadly day in Chicago. Epic Academy senior Travon Freeman gunned down on his bike, six-year-old Nolan Woods shot on the Bishop Ford, ‘JDogg’ of NLMB killed in South Shore, police tape and squad cars marking block after block. CPD failed to log most of it, leaving street reporters and citizen feeds to document the bloodshed.
Federal agents patrolled downtown with rifles, politicians postured over immigration optics, and yet Black children and young men were left unprotected as bullets, knives, and silence cut through the city.
Federal Troops Spark Faux Outrage
WBBM radio’s 4:30 p.m. broadcast led with Governor JB Pritzker’s staged fury over DHS requesting 100 National Guard troops in Illinois, denouncing what he called a “MAGA Republican-supported invasion” of American cities.
Mayor Brandon Johnson echoed the alarm, rejecting the “militarization of American cities.”
Court filings revealed charges against Broadview ICE facility protesters: loaded handguns, assaults on agents, and even death threats against Border Patrol.
Illinois AG Kwame Raoul vowed to sue the Trump administration, mirroring Oregon’s litigation over federal deployments.
Republican challenger Ted Dabrowski countered from DuPage County, accusing Pritzker of “fomenting violence” and pledging to repeal Illinois’ sanctuary law if elected.
Violence Across the City — September 29
While politicians sparred, the streets bled. The day’s violence began on the South Side, where Travon Freeman, 17, senior and student council president at Epic Academy, was riding his bike to school when two offenders approached and opened fire. He was struck multiple times and died on the pavement outside 83rd and Baker.
Hours later in South Shore, a 19-year-old was shot in the chest and rushed to the hospital in critical condition.
By mid-afternoon, the gunfire spread to 78th and Essex.
Two men were hit in a storm of nineteen shell casings; a 19-year-old took a bullet to the chest, while 27-year-old “JDogg” of the NLMB crew was shot six times in the back and later died.
Police recovered two weapons from the victims and found a rifle with live rounds abandoned a block away at 77th and Kingston.
The killing didn’t stop there.
On Wentworth Avenue, a 21-year-old man riddled with gunshot wounds was pronounced dead at the University of Chicago Hospital at 2:42 p.m., a homicide recorded by Spot News but never acknowledged on the Chicago Police Department’s Media Major Incident Notifications site.
In Austin, confusion swept Lake and Laramie late in the afternoon.
Dispatchers first pushed out an alert for a shooting, but when officers secured the block they found no gunfire — instead, a man had been beaten so badly that he lay in critical condition.
Crowds gathered, police scrambled to manage disturbances spilling east along Lake Street, and witnesses pointed to a suspect who was quickly taken into custody.
The language barrier between responders and some onlookers only heightened the chaos, a detail that underscored just how fragile control has become on the West Side.
Despite the severity, the case never appeared on CPD’s Media Major Incident Notifications site.
As evening fell, blood spilled beyond the bullets.
At Rainbow Beach Park, a basketball game erupted into violence when a man was stabbed in the face and head, the attacker pedaling south through the park with a black-and-white backpack.
Police taped off the scene, but the case, too, never appeared on CPD’s official feed.
Night brought more shocks.
On the Bishop Ford Expressway near 103rd Street, six-year-old Nolan Woods was shot in the thigh while riding in a family car. He survived after being rushed to Comer Children’s Hospital.
Illinois State Police took the case, meaning the shooting of a Black child will not count toward Chicago’s crime statistics. CPD’s incident site stayed silent.
Just before 11 p.m., officers in the 12th District found a 26-year-old man on Ruble Street with a bullet in his leg. He was taken to Stroger in good condition but could provide no details. Detectives opened an investigation, but again, the public only learned through scanner traffic.
Even after midnight the violence carried forward.
ICE agents stormed an apartment building at 2658 East 75th Street, at 1:18 a.m., executing a raid that rattled the neighborhood.
A flashbang detonated near a CTA bus and was mistaken for live gunfire, sending panic through the block as reports poured across Citizen.
Federal agents rerouted buses and locked down the scene, but official CPD notifications said nothing at all.
System Failure in Plain View
Around 4:00 p.m., a 911 call about a panhandler standing in the middle of Lake Shore Drive near Monroe was routed not to a Chicago dispatcher but to an out-of-city call center.
From there it was transferred back into the city system, where the operator barely took the information before hanging up.
A human body in traffic at rush hour was treated as a nuisance, not an emergency — another glimpse at a system designed to deflect rather than respond.
What the City Erases
September 29 was one of the more bloodier days of the year — three confirmed homicides, a six-year-old shot on the Bishop Ford, a man stabbed in a public park, a man beaten into critical condition, and multiple others wounded.
Yet the official record tells a different story.
The Chicago Police Department’s Media Major Incident Notifications site — the system supposedly meant to alert press — failed to report some of the day’s most serious events.
The homicide on Wentworth, the Rainbow Beach Park stabbing, the Lake and Laramie beating, the ICE raid on 75th Street, and even the shooting of six-year-old Nolan Woods all disappeared from the city’s official feed.
Cases were pushed to outsiders — Illinois State Police for the child, ICE for the raid — so that Chicago could still claim “crime is down.”
Just like the quadruple murder on a CTA train was logged in Forest Park instead of the city, and universities quietly handle their own cases off the books.
This is how the narrative is built: the bloodshed doesn’t stop, it’s just counted somewhere else.
If it were not for street reports from Spot News, Chitown Crime Chasers, the Citizen App, and other independent feeds, the public would not know about more than half of the major incidents that happened today.
In Chicago, Black victims are erased not just from headlines but from the very systems designed to notify the public.
The official narrative is managed — not through transparency, but through silence.
Censorship and fascism is unfolding in real time, on the streets of Chicago — carried out by the city’s elected progressive politicians.
SubX.News® on-the-spot reporting
Source Note: This report is compiled from live SubXNews video feeds, on-the-ground reporting, police scanner traffic, X crime spotter profiles (Spot News, Chitown Crime Chasers, Citizen App), CBS News Chicago, and direct interviews conducted on September 29, 2025
