From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 17-year-old son robbed near North Side home

Posted: 12/20/2014, 07:30pm | Michael Sneed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 17-year-old son was robbed Friday night across the street from his family’s North Side home, leaving him with a chipped tooth and fat lip, a source told the Sun-Times’ Michael Sneed. Zach Emanuel went outside to take a walk around 10 p.m. Friday and was jumped in the 4200 block of North Hermitage Avenue in Ravenswood, according to the source.

Nice neighborhood. I’ve been to that area a dozen times. It’s near the El’s short but select Brown Line, which has a relatively upper-middle class ridership. Chicago has a tradition that the mayor’s house in the city is supposed to be respectable but not lavish. (You weren’t supposed to ask about the Daley family’s summer house across the lake in Michigan.)

… Two people approached the teenager from behind as he was walking and talking on his cell phone, according to a police report that said one of them “placed his arm around the victim’s neck in a bear chokehold.” Then, the other attacker punched Zach Emanuel in the face, knocking him to the ground, the report said. Accoridng to the police, the teenager dropped his phone, and his attackers took it, then patted him down and asked, “What else you got?” Then, they forced him “to enter his security code to unlock the phone” and ran off. Zach Emanuel was left with a chipped tooth and a fat lip, the source said. According to the police report, he was treated by his “personal physician for a laceration and blunt-force trauma to the mouth/face.” No weapon was involved, the source said. The mayor, who attended the funeral Saturday of slain teen Demario Bailey, was “crestfallen” over his son being the victim of a strong-arm robbery, the source said. … Earlier this week, the mayor spoke about his teenage son when asked about the trip the family was taking to Chile for the holidays. “This is Zach’s last year before he goes off to college — if I don’t kill him before he goes there,” he said then. “But that’s a side note. That has nothing to do with the vacation. That just deals with having a teenaged boy at home.”

So I’m not sure if I totally believe the mugging story. Hizzoner gets a police cruiser parked out front 24×7.

There’s always something interesting going on with the Emanuel clan:

So perhaps this will be one crisis Rahm lets go to waste?

But whatever happened with the Emanuels, their public story is what happened in private to my in-laws, who didn’t get round-the-clock police protection, a few miles west of there in the Austin neighborhood in 1967-1970. Except it happened three times to their children and their children were ten years younger. I’m sure T.N. Coates could explicate how, if you study the footnote on p. 322 of some sociology book, you can see how it was all the children’s fault, but I must confess to not being up to speed.