(Chicago) SubXNews Street Report | Sept 17, 2025
Sad news came in as the mother and two children pulled from Lake Michigan over the weekend were identified. Authorities confirmed 31-year-old Drake Patton, her one-year-old daughter Jream Washington, and six-year-old son Wyatt Patton drowned on Saturday, September 13, 2025.
Jream was discovered near 57th Street Beach late that morning, while Patton and Wyatt were recovered hours later near 63rd Street Beach in Jackson Park. On Tuesday evening, a balloon release and vigil at 57th Street Beach honored the family.
Brandon Washington, Jream’s father, used the moment to call for stronger mental-health support, pointing to Patton’s history of untreated depression.
The Cook County Medical Examiner confirmed their identities, with autopsies still pending.
The Chicago City Council faces an October 1 deadline on the 1% grocery tax, a 30-year fixture generating $80 million annually. Mayor Brandon Johnson, speaking at Clarendon Park in the 46th Ward, is pushing to retain it to avoid budget gaps, though an ordinance has been stalled in committee since June.
His message: wealthier Chicagoans should pay more, but without raising the tax rate.
In Arlington Heights, a memorial for conservative activist Charlie Kirk at North School Park—flags, balloons, flowers, candles, cards, and signs—will remain through the weekend despite park rules, shifting to another area before a Sunday service in Arizona.
In Pennsylvania, three law enforcement officers were gunned down and two more critically injured while serving a domestic warrant in York County.
The suspect was killed in the exchange, but not before leaving families and a township torn apart.
The killings underscore the stakes of policing at its most dangerous.
When a mayor in Chicago calls law enforcement a “sickness,” those words don’t stay local — they ripple outward, feeding a culture that devalues officers’ lives and emboldens violence against them.
Former CDC director Susan Menarche testified against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine policies, saying they lacked evidence and could trigger resurgent diseases like polio.
Wall Street showed mixed reaction to a Fed quarter-point rate cut: the Dow rose 260, the S&P slipped 6, and the Nasdaq fell 73. Locally, suburban officials reported a West Nile virus death, and another woman was rescued from Lake Michigan.
Downtown Windows Tell the Story
Started the ride rolling past the boarded-up Rolex store.
What’s up? Everybody? SubX News on the spot reporting downtown. Rolex still has those busted windows. That’s the Rolex smash-and-grab.
Don’t forget… it was a smash-and-grab during the middle of the afternoon.
It wasn’t at night, wasn’t at three in the morning like they did at Louis Vuitton.
It was in the middle of the day.
Same thing happened in Nordstrom.
And while the plywood is on the Mag Mile, the mayor’s at a press conference calling law enforcement a sickness.
Says it’s got to be eradicated, like cops are the disease.
He brags “This has been a problem in this city for a very long time” and tries to sell the line that his initiatives are fixing it.
He even claims President Trump “wants to put his name on our paper” and take credit for a so-called downtrend.
He props it up with outlier years — 1974’s record 970 murders, 1995 at 828, 2016 at 778, 2021 at 805 — while skipping the decade when killings actually stayed under 500.
He says we’re on a “better pathway,” says it’s a sickness and he’s going to eradicate it.
Out here, the boarded-up storefronts tell the truth.
It’s crime and his policies that need to be eradicated.
Scanner Glitch / Crime Spree
All three livestream phones froze at once even though they were on different carriers. “Not accidental — Google’s a virus,” came the crack.
When the feed came back, scanner chatter tracked a stolen black 2020 Toyota Corolla with Eddie Henry plates, rear bumper already smashed from hitting a pole, headed east on Madison and maybe north on Holman.
A lemonade vendor at 1934 EC Drive, brown shorts, burgundy truck, was reported packing a silver handgun.
Trouble hit 660 N Wells too, where two heavyset Black women shoved servers inside Hooters and disrupted the joint.
Roosevelt’s drug strip was the original destination, but Wells pulled the focus.
Twitter posts of scanner traffic pointed to a Chase Bank robbery in Lansing at 16767 Torrence Ave, reportedly a white sedan 3 male blacks wearing sweatshirts 1 firearm displayed taken $6k. Last seen on Torrence northbound in the early afternoon.
Anti-ICE Protest
Police ordered to protect an anti-police protest.
Stumbled up an Anti-ICE protest rolling south on Clark, streets blocked. CPD right there facilitating it, Johnson’s executive order makes them do it.
He just signed that order — cops must help anti-ICE protesters. And don’t forget, this is the same Brandon Johnson tied up with Bill Ayers. His videos are out there, standing with him. Ayers gets a fat government pension while Johnson calls cops a sickness and lets radicals march under protection of the government he wants to destroy.
Cops protecting people who hate cops — life is stranger than fiction.
On the day when three officers are murdered, and who is sick?
Tents and Lamborghinis
Rolled through what’s left of Cabrini Green — towers gone, playgrounds gone, just one row of projects left standing like a museum piece in the middle of million-dollar condos. Cops parked on both ends of Cambridge don’t stop the killings — this strip has one of the highest murder rates in the city. Families are stuck in the last public housing while developers sell the future around them.
It’s the same story: destruction branded as renewal.
A few blocks down, the Blommer Chocolate Factory sits cold and shuttered, the air that once smelled like cocoa now just dust and silence. The closure ripped out jobs and history at the same time, leaving another dead zone where working people used to make a living.
Talked with a man outside who had nothing but the street left to him, standing where a factory paycheck used to keep people afloat. The building’s shell is a reminder that Chicago trades livelihoods for speculation.
North by the Bally’s site, the Salvation Army stands abandoned. Talked with another man — just out of jail, now sleeping in one of the brand-new tents under the viaduct. He said the city would rather push people under bridges than open the empty shelter, even while the casino cranes climb skyward.
Services that once saved lives are locked, and the people get dumped right back into the street.
It’s Chicago upside down: billion-dollar casinos and zero room for the poor.
Pushed over to Fulton Market, the so-called Google Town. Outdoor patios looked full but the side streets were bare, surface lots empty, a whole scene more staged than real. Google’s $3 trillion fortress at Morgan sits across from condos and bars, but no theaters, no music, no heartbeat — just packaged nightlife for expense accounts.
Lambos and high-end imports parked curbside flashed the money, while tents just blocks away showed the other side of the ledger.
Fulton looks busy, but it’s hollow — corporate power dressed up as culture.
Alley Attack at Tanner School
Near 73rd and Langley, a 64-year-old off-duty Broadview cop got jumped in an alley by a man with a knife. He drew his weapon and fired, hitting the attacker in the legs and arm before the man stumbled into Tanner Elementary’s lot and collapsed behind a shipping container. Kids were still outside playing hopscotch as cops and ambulances swarmed the schoolyard. The knife was recovered, the attacker hospitalized, and charges are coming — a reminder how fast daylight turns to a crime scene.
Madison Street Standoff
Not long after, another man with a knife was waving down cars in the 5200 block of Madison, right where the drug markets run. Cops ordered him to drop it, fired tasers that did nothing, then finally opened fire, hitting him in the stomach, hand, and shoulder. Crowds packed in, traffic shut down, ambulances weaving through as officers tried to hold the block. Madison looked like a war zone — barricades, flashing lights, and another case where the city couldn’t control its own streets.
Lower Wacker Crash
After midnight, Lower Wacker turned into chaos. A car smashed into a Streets & Sanitation sweeper just west of Michigan, mangling the front end and leaving the truck twisted in the lane. Responders dragged out a stretcher, but no word yet if the driver made it. The whole lower level shut down, gridlock spilling through the Loop until dawn.
Another CTA Stabbing
Police responded around 12:36 a.m. to the Blue Line near Cicero after a 21-year-old woman was stabbed during a train car argument that spiraled into bloodshed. Several men cornered her, one pulled a blade, and she took multiple wounds before making it off at Oak Park. Fire crews rushed her to Loyola, where she’s in fair condition.
No arrests, no IDs — just another knife attack on a night already full of alley stick-ups and blade fights.
Smiley Face Behind the Crime Tape
Chicago’s streets bled from every angle — alleys turning into ambush zones, trains into knife fights, and main drags into police shootouts. The mayor talks about eradicating cops, but what’s vanishing are the rules that keep people alive.
You can see it in boarded storefronts, in tents pitched under condos, in crowds scattering when the gunfire starts.
You can see it in the chalk sun and hopscotch grid at Langley, roped off under crime tape.
And behind it all, the grief is real — a mother and two children pulled dead from Lake Michigan, three officers gunned down in Pennsylvania.
It’s not theory, it’s the daily reality — and if anything needs eradicating, it’s the chaos swallowing the city.
SubX.News® on-the-spot reporting
About Street Reports
Street Reports are compiled from the previous day’s reporting on Facebook and Twitter live-feed drives through Chicago — chasing crimes as they go out over police dispatch and pulling into the neighborhoods to see what’s really happening on the ground. Fifty-five years living in this city, it never gets old checking out new and familiar places, seeing what people are up to.
