Stories by Matt Masterson

The incidents each involved a group of men approaching a lone woman and threatening them, sometimes at gunpoint, according to police.

Sheila O’Brien, who successfully petitioned for a special prosecutor to take over the Jussie Smollett investigation, is now seeking to bar the Cook County state’s attorney from using taxpayer dollars to pay for her own outside counsel.

A Chicago man from the South Side is facing felony criminal charges after he allegedly carjacked a Porsche and another vehicle that had two children in it on the Near North Side.

Jury selection in the trial of 46-year-old Shomari Legghette will begin Feb. 27, just over two years since Chicago Police Cmdr. Paul Bauer was fatally shot in a downtown stairwell.

As the city continues its work to bring down the homicide rate following a 2016 spike, Chicago’s interim police superintendent believes one thing is absolutely necessary: winning back the public’s trust.

Federal prosecutors say the 16-year sentence given last year to Adel Daoud, who attempted to detonate what he thought was a bomb outside a downtown bar, is “substantively unreasonable” and failed to account for Daoud’s “commitment to violence.”

Timothy Dorsey, 52, pleaded guilty last year to running a multistate sex trafficking ring and was implicated in the 2015 murder of one of his former prostitutes. This week, he was sentenced to a decade in prison.

A Chicago doctor is suing her former employer, claiming she faced retaliation and was ultimately fired after blowing the whistle on alleged cost-cutting practices that she says put patients at risk.

Advocates and educators spoke in Chicago on Tuesday, hoping to give state leaders a better sense of what must be done to address student isolation and seclusion in Illinois schools.

This year’s report from Chicago Public Schools’ Office of Inspector General includes data from the new Sexual Allegations Unit, which was formed in the wake of the Chicago Tribune’s bombshell “Betrayed” series.

The majority of Chicago Public Schools’ district-run elementary and high schools are not being properly utilized, according to new data.

The family of the murdered Chinese scholar had accused university social workers of acting with “deliberate indifference” toward warning signs shown by Brendt Christensen.

Both local and state police will be ramping up their patrol deployments Tuesday night to maintain safety at busy New Year’s Eve events and along roads as marijuana legalization takes effect.

Brian Travis was arrested on Christmas Day at O’Hare International Airport and charged with sexually assaulting an underage female student from an Albany Park neighborhood high school.

Brendan Dassey was 16 years old when he confessed to assisting his uncle, Steven Avery, with the rape and murder of Teresa Halbach. His case and subsequent appeals were made famous in the 2015 Netflix series “Making a Murderer.”

Last year, 86% of the nearly 490,000 traffic stops made by Chicago police involved a driver of color, according to the ACLU of Illinois. Of those, 300,000 stops involved a black driver.

Dwright Boone-Doty and Corey Morgan were convicted in October of first-degree murder for the killing of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee. The two will each spend multiple decades behind bars for the slaying, which prosecutors called a “dark day” in the city of Chicago.

Attorneys from Chicago’s Law Department argue in a new filing Monday that the former “Empire” star’s countersuit should be thrown out, in part, because that criminal case could be reopened.

The Chicago Board of Education and a West Side charter school are being sued by a female student who claims the school’s ex-basketball coach sexually assaulted her multiple times last year.

Federal prosecutors said that by lying to a grand jury, 58-year-old Beena Patel “threw a wrench in the wheels of justice and ground them to a halt.”

Armando Lopez, 19, was charged with first-degree murder in connection with the killing of registered nurse Frank Aguilar, 32, on Nov. 12. Detectives believe they’ve also identified the shooter, who is not yet in custody.

In three weeks, Illinois will become the 11th state with legalized marijuana sales. On Wednesday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker joined Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx as she began the process of vacating thousands of low-level cannabis convictions.

A Chicago firm is suing the vendor behind the SAT and Advanced Placement exams in a federal class-action suit that accuses them of collecting and selling millions of students’ personal information.

The U.S. government is moving to revoke the citizenship of José Vilchis, a longtime gymnastics coach who’s been accused of sexually abusing multiple underage girls over the course of three-plus decades.

The Chicago Police Board held the first of three community listening sessions Monday in Washington Heights as it continues its search for a new superintendent.

In June, Brendt Christensen was convicted of kidnapping and killing University of Illinois Chinese scholar Yingying Zhang. This week, he was sent to McCreary United States Penitentiary, a high-security federal prison that houses some 1,500 convicts in southern Kentucky.