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Chicago mom was killed after abuser was allowed to keep his guns
CHICAGO (CBS) — Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law that says domestic abusers with protection orders are banned from owning guns. But there are still problems domestic violence survivors face trying to get guns out of the hands of abuses, as in the case of one Chicago mother who was killed earlier this year after her abuser was allowed to keep his guns.
Our current moment can be a dangerous one for victims, as court sources say the law is unclear as to whether judges have the authority to take away guns at this point, during the Emergency Order of Protection process.
Mitchell Family
China Mitchell went to court in October 2022 and was granted an Emergency Order of Protection against her former boyfriend, Louie Foster, whom she accused of abuse. But she needed more than the order, said Pauline McQueen, who was raised with China.
“It didn’t help her,” said McQueen. “Nothing helped her.”
Mitchell Family
In the same hearing, Mitchell also requested a seizure warrant to have Foster’s guns taken away. On the court petition she was required to fill out, Mitchell checked boxes warning he had a history of violence, was suicidal, and was a threat to the public.
But a judge did not grant the warrant. Transcripts from the court hearing reveal there was not one mention of Mitchell’s request to remove the guns.
This is a problem, said Benna Crawford, an attorney from Legal Aid Chicago — who represents domestic violence victims.
“It was worse, I think, than being denied,” said Crawford. “It was just ignored.”
In January 2024, Mitchell became one of the latest domestic violence victims shot and killed by her abuser according to police and court records. She was 33 years old and a mom to three children.
Mitchell Family
Mitchell Family
Mitchell was a security guard who worked along a Chicago Transit Authority rail line. Her friends called her “the diva,” always dressed up, and always so kind.
“China was a helpful person,” said McQueen, “She helped everybody.”
Mitchell also was worried for her safety says her mom, Brenda Mitchell.
“China said, ‘I think he’s going to catch me and try to kill me,'” said Brenda Mitchell.
In the Emergency Order of Protection petition, China Mitchell wrote her ex-boyfriend “beat” her and said, “I’m going to break your neck, [expletive].”
She said he “strangled” her until she was “unconscious.” Mitchell also said during some of the attack, she was holding her daughter.
Mitchell wrote, “I was bleeding on the baby.”
- Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline: 877-863-6338
- National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233
Police said on Jan. 15, Foster found Mitchell outside a pawn shop where she liked to buy and sell jewelry. China Mitchell’s father, Frankie Mitchell, explains what police say happened after she ran inside the business.
“China ran around the place into the bathroom,” said Frankie Mitchell about the attack detailed in police and court records. “He caught China in the bathroom and shot her in the chest. And when she fell on the floor, he shot her again in the side of the head.”
“You would think he would think before he pulled that trigger, because I’m pretty sure China said, ‘What about Olivia?’,” said McQueen.
Foster is Olivia’s dad. He pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and being an armed habitual offender.
China Mitchell’s funeral was packed with people wearing purple ribbons for domestic violence awareness.
Mitchell Family
So many lives were ripped apart by a gun, an ex-boyfriend, and a system that can make it hard to get guns out of the hands of abusers.
Data from the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County shows in Cook County alone, during the past 10 years, nearly 112,000 emergency orders were granted. No one tracks the number of domestic violence survivors requesting guns be removed.
But the Circuit Court Clerk’s records show only 85 gun seizure warrants were granted.
“It’s an inappropriately low number, but it isn’t surprising to me,” said Crawford.
When judges decide whether to issue gun seizure warrants, they often do so while not knowing the accused abusers’ criminal backgrounds.
“It’s just not a position that we want judges to be in, to make life or death decisions,” said Crawford.
A domestic violence survivor has to bring proof of their abuser’s violent criminal history to court. That is likely something Mitchell did not know to do.
Foster was a felon who served time relating to a gun charge and could not legally own a gun.
“And as it turned out to be true, without the issuance of that removing his firearm, she was likely to be seriously harmed or killed,” Crawford said of Mitchell.
Mitchell’s parents are now raising her three children and continue grieving their daughter’s death.
Mitchell Family
“It seemed like she never left,” said Brenda Mitchell. “But it seems like she’s not coming back either.”
On June 6, what would have been China’s 34th birthday, her family and friends gathered to release purple balloons. Her dad has a special message for her.
Mitchell Family
“China, I love you, and I miss you,” said Frankie Mitchell. “I tell you goodnight every night, and I tell you good morning every morning. And I think you’re looking over me because I’m doing the best I can with your children. I love you, and I’ll see you later—just not yet. But please save a seat for me.”
Illinois lawmakers have been sitting on a bill that could help fix this problem. It’s called Karina’s bill, and it has been stalled for more than a year in Springfield.
The bill was named after a woman and her daughter who were gunned down by an abuser.
If you are in a domestic violence situation or know someone who is, the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County has guidance on getting a protection order. The Network, an advocacy group for domestic violence victims, put together a toolkit on how to create a safety plan.
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2 shot dead, 4 wounded by Mexico’s National Guard on migrant smuggling route near U.S. border
Mexico’s National Guard fatally shot two Colombians and wounded four others in what the Defense Department claimed was a confrontation near the U.S. border.
Colombia’s foreign ministry said in a statement Sunday that all of the victims were migrants who had been “caught in the crossfire.” It identified the dead as a 20-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman, and gave the number of Colombians wounded as five, not four. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy. The victims were identified by the foreign ministry as Yuli Vanessa Herrera Marulanda and Ronaldo Andrés Quintero Peñuelas.
Mexico’s Defense Department, which controls the National Guard, did not respond to requests for comment Monday on whether the victims were migrants, but it said one Colombian who was not injured in the shootings was turned over to immigration officials, suggesting they were.
If they were migrants, it would mark the second time in just over a month that military forces in Mexico have opened fire on and killed migrants.
On Oct. 1, the day President Claudia Sheinbaum took office, soldiers opened fire on a truck, killing six migrants in the southern state of Chiapas. An 11-year-old girl from Egypt, her 18-year-old sister and a 17-year-old boy from El Salvador died in that shooting, along with people from Peru and Honduras.
The most recent shootings happened Saturday on a dirt road near Tecate, east of Otay Mesa on the California border, that is frequently used by Mexican migrant smugglers, the department said in a statement late Sunday.
The Defense Department said a militarized National Guard patrol came under fire after spotting two vehicles — a gray pickup and a white SUV — in the area, which is near an informal border crossing and wind power generation plant known as La Rumorosa.
One truck sped off and escaped. The National Guard opened fire on the other truck, killing two Colombians and wounding four others. There was no immediate information on their conditions, and there were no reported casualties among the guardsmen involved.
One Colombian and one Mexican man were found and detained unharmed at the scene, and the departments said officers found a pistol and several magazines commonly used for assault rifles at the scene.
Colombians have sometimes been recruited as gunmen for Mexican drug cartels, which are also heavily involved in migrant smuggling. But the fact the survivor was turned over to immigration officials and that the Foreign Relations Department contacted the Colombian consulate suggests they were migrants.
Cartel gunmen sometimes escort or kidnap migrants as they travel to the U.S. border. One possible scenario was that armed migrant smugglers may have been in one or both of the trucks, but that the migrants were basically unarmed bystanders.
The defense department said the three National Guard officers who opened fire have been taken off duty while the incident is being investigated.
Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office Sept. 30, gave the military an unprecedentedly wide role in public life and law enforcement; he created the militarized Guard and used the combined military forces as the country’s main law enforcement agencies, supplanting police. The Guard has since been placed under the control of the army.
But critics say the military is not trained to do civilian law enforcement work. Moreover, lopsided death tolls in such confrontations – in which all the deaths and injuries occur on one side – raise suspicions among activists whether there really was a confrontation.
For example, the soldiers who opened fire in Chiapas – who have been detained pending charges – claimed they heard “detonations” prior to opening fire. There was no indication any weapons were found at the scene.
A Kenyan man was convicted Monday of plotting a 9/11-style attack on a U.S. building on behalf of the terrorist organization al-Shabab.
A federal jury in Manhattan found Cholo Abdi Abdullah guilty on all six counts he faced for conspiring to hijack an aircraft and slam it into a building, according to court records.
He’s due to be sentenced next March and faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison.
Handout / Criminal Investigation and Detection Group
Abdullah represented himself during the trial, which opened last week. He declined to give an opening statement and did not actively participate in questioning witnesses.
In court papers filed ahead of the trial, prosecutors said Abdullah intended to “merely sit passively during the trial, not oppose the prosecution and whatever the outcome, he would accept the outcome because he does not believe that this is a legitimate system.”
Lawyers appointed to assist Abdullah in his self-defense didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Monday.
Federal prosecutors, who rested their case Thursday, said Abdullah plotted the attack for four years, undergoing extensive training in explosives and how to operate in secret and avoid detection.
He then moved to the Philippines in 2017 and began training as a commercial pilot.
Abdullah was almost finished with his two-year pilot training when he was arrested in 2019 on local charges.
He was transferred the following year to U.S. law enforcement authorities, who charged him with terrorism-related crimes.
Prosecutors said Abdullah also researched how to breach a cockpit door and information “about the tallest building in a major U.S. city” before he was caught.
The State Department in 2008 designated al-Shabab, which means “the youth” in Arabic, as a foreign terrorist organization. The militant group is an al Qaeda affiliate that has fought to establish an Islamic state in Somalia based on Shariah law.
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The remains of 28 Civil War soldiers were found in a funeral home’s storage. They’ve now been laid to rest.
For several decades, the cremated remains of more than two dozen American Civil War veterans languished in storage facilities at a funeral home and cemetery in Seattle.
The simple copper and cardboard urns gathering dust on shelves only had the name of each of the 28 soldiers – but nothing linking them to the Civil War. Still, that was enough for an organization dedicated to locating, identifying and interring the remains of unclaimed veterans to conclude over several years that they were all Union soldiers deserving of a burial service with military honors.
“It’s amazing that they were still there and we found them,” said Tom Keating, the Washington state coordinator for the Missing In America Project, which turned to a team of volunteers to confirm their war service through genealogical research. “It’s something long overdue. These people have been waiting a long time for a burial.”
Most of the veterans were buried in August at Washington’s Tahoma National Cemetery.
In a traditional service offered to Civil War veterans, the historical 4th U.S. Infantry Regiment dressed in Union uniforms fired musket volleys and the crowd sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Names were called out for each veteran and their unit before their remains were brought forward and stories were shared about their exploits. Then, they were buried.
Among them was a veteran held at a Confederate prison known as Andersonville. Several were wounded in combat and others fought in critical battles including Gettysburg, Stones River and the Atlanta campaign. One man survived being shot thanks to his pocket watch – which he kept until his death – and another deserted the Confederate Army and joined the Union forces.
“It was something, just the finality of it all,” Keating said, adding they were unable to find any living descendants of the veterans.
While some remains are hidden away in funeral homes, others were found where they fell in battle or by Civil War re-enactors combing old graveyards.
Charles Lawrence / AP
Communities often turn reburials into major events, allowing residents to celebrate veterans and remember a long-forgotten war. In 2016, a volunteer motorcycle group escorted the remains of one veteran cross country from Oregon to the final resting place in Maine. In South Carolina, the remains of 21 Confederate soldiers recovered from forgotten graves beneath the stands of a military college’s football stadium were reburied in 2005.
Sometimes reburials spark controversy. The discovery of the remains of two soldiers from the Manassas National Battlefield in Virginia prompted an unsuccessful attempt in 2018 by several families to have DNA tests done on them. The Army rejected that request and reburied them as unknown soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.
Along with those buried at Tahoma, Keating said, several others will be buried at Washington State Veterans Cemetery and a Navy veteran will be buried at sea. The remains of several more Civil War veterans were sent to Maine, Rhode Island and other places where family connections were found.
“Would have been lost to history”
Among them was Byron Johnson. Born in Pawtucket in 1844, he enlisted at 18 and served as a hospital steward with the Union Army. He moved out West after the war and died in Seattle in 1913. After his remains were delivered to Pawtucket City Hall, he was buried with military honors at his family’s plot in Oak Grove Cemetery.
Pawtucket Mayor Donald R. Grebien said Johnson’s burial service was the right thing to do.
“When you have somebody who served in a war but especially this war, we want to honor them,” he said. “It became more intriguing when you think this individual was left out there and not buried in his own community.”
Grebien said the burials recall important lessons about the 1861-1865 war to preserve the Union, fought between the North’s Union Army and the Confederate States of America at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
“It was important to remind people not only in Pawtucket but the state of Rhode Island and nationwide that we have people who sacrificed their lives for us and for a lot of the freedoms we have,” he said.
Bruce Frail and his son Ben – both long active in the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War – were on hand for service. Ben Frail was also a re-enactor at Johnson’s service, portraying a Union Army captain.
Charles Lawrence / AP
“It’s the best thing we can do for a veteran,” said Bruce Frail, a former commander-in-chief with the Sons of Union Veterans and state coordinator for Missing In America Project.
“The feeling that you get when you honor somebody in that way, it’s indescribable,” he said.
The Missing in America Project says it has identified the remains of over 7,000 veterans and has buried over 6,800 soldiers.
The task of piecing together Johnson’s life story was left to Amelia Boivin, the constituent liaison in the Pawtucket mayor’s office. A history buff, she recalled getting the call requesting the city take possession of his remains and bury them with his family. She got to work and Johnson’s story became the talk of City Hall.
She determined Johnson grew up in Pawtucket, had two sisters and a brother and worked as a druggist after the war. He left to make his fortune out West, first in San Francisco and eventually in Seattle, where he worked nearly up until his death. It doesn’t appear Johnson ever married or had children, and no living relatives were found.
“I felt like it was resolution of sorts,” Boivin said. “It felt like we were doing right for someone who otherwise would have been lost to history.”
Earlier this year, two Union soldiers were posthumously honored by President Biden with the Medal of Honor for their courage in the “Great Locomotive Chase,” in which they went deep behind Confederate lines and stole a train in Marietta, Georgia. They ran the train north, tearing up tracks and cutting telegraph wires as they went.
