Riley Fox

In the summer of 2004, a little girl named Riley Fox was abducted and murdered in the small town of Wilmington, Ill., about 60 miles southwest of Chicago. It was a gruesome crime that rocked the Rust Belt community and remains a mystery to this day.
But more than just a tragedy and a whodunit, the Riley Fox case is the story of her family’s strange, overwhelming ordeal — a nightmare in which Riley’s death was only the first excruciating episode.

On the morning of June 6, 2004, Kevin Fox was home alone with his two children, 3-year-old daughter Riley and son Tyler, 6. His wife Melissa was away that weekend for a walk to raise breast cancer awareness in Chicago.

Just before 8 a.m., Tyler woke Kevin and told him that Riley was gone. Kevin began searching for her himself, but after 40 minutes with no luck he called the police.

By the time Melissa found out and rushed home from Chicago, nearly the entire town was helping search for the little girl. The turnout was a testament to just how close the community is.

“Everybody was so supportive. I mean, I still, I can’t thank everyone enough … It was really unbelievable,” Melissa said.

Kevin and Melissa Fox grew up in Wilmington and were high-school sweethearts. Kevin, a painter, doted on his precious daughter, saying she had “big brown eyes, the way she would look at you, and her smile. She just made your heart melt.”
Source: abcnews.go.com

The Replacements

I know I recently said that Pere Ubu sound like the Midwest – all post-industrial, bent-out-of-shape weirdness – but the very heart and soul of Midwestern rock n’ roll was, and still is The Replacements.  Why?  Because unlike the Jersey boys and girls that Springsteen sang about who just wanted to get the fuck out and start new lives, Paul Westerberg wrote anthems for the throngs of bored but not too lazy to go anywhere kids from the Rust Belt: the dairy towns of Wisconson, the burnt out Detroit suburbs, and of course his home state where many are born but few ever leave, Minnesota.
In October of 1985, to celebrate the release of the album Tim – the one that would surely make them the biggest band in the universe – The ‘Mats took their hometown of Minneapolis by storm with a five night stand at the 7th Street Entry.  A second after some random crowd member yells out “more amphetamines” like beer-soaked tigers sprung from their cage, Westerberg and Co. absolutely rip the venue apart for a set nearly two times the length of the album they were releasing.

Giving a listen to this show, one grasps that The Replacements might have been on the cusp of becoming the group of guys that made it, one hit away from forever cementing their reputation as the great American band.  But something went wrong, and like many of the greats they came up just short in their own time only to influence an entire generation after their demise.  But on this autumn night in October, from the originals to the covers (Alice Cooper’s classic “Eighteen” makes an appearance here), there was no band that could match The Replacements in the entire world.  I’d be hard pressed to find anyone that could even today, but as things go it was just never meant to be.
Source: imposemagazine.com