Elizabeth Donald

Sometimes Emily Halasey feels as if she’s in zero gravity with objects flying at her, but she can’t move.
“You just know if you move or if you dodge, there’s another rock that’s just going to hurl at you,” the 18-year-old from Collinsville said, describing her anxiety. Depression is like that, too, except those objects are pushing her down — at least that’s how it feels to Emily.
At least 37 teenagers have died by suicide in the metro-east since 2006, including Emily’s childhood friend — an average of three suicides each year, according to local coroners.

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville was struck once again with racist graffiti Thursday, this time referring to black people as non-citizens on a classroom blackboard.
The message was left on a blackboard in SIUE’s Peck Hall and was discovered Thursday. It quoted in part an 1857 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.
The message read, “No person of African descent shall be citizen of the U.S. ... nor were they ever intended to be. Dred Scott Decision — Google I...

Headlines from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day will soon be part of the library collection at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, after a family donated scrapbooks from World War II newspapers to the museum — the news as the first rough draft of history.
Dorris William Wilton, of Alton, was a manufacturing executive with McDonnell’s aircraft division while his son, Dorris Wilbur Wilton, served with the U.S. Army in north Africa, Sicily and Italy during World War II. While his son served overse...

When Rudy Wilson entered a metro-east high school to check up on some of his student teachers, it was made very clear that he wasn’t wanted there.

It was the 1970s, and Wilson was an education professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. But after his unfriendly reception at a high school when he was trying to mentor his student teachers...

The gun debates raging in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting include focus on a little-known modifier used by the shooter: a “bump stock” that lets a semi-automatic rifle fire hundreds of bullets in seconds...

The St. Louis Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists condemns the arrest of reporter Mike Faulk by St. Louis police during the weekend’s protests and demonstrations.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has reported that one of their own, reporter Mike Faulk, was caught in a controversial police tactic known as “kettling” on Sunday night. Faulk was on duty covering the protests and the ensuing police action when police apparently blocked all four sides of the intersection...

John Brown rolled his wheelchair up to Dreymore’s horse stall and unwrapped a mint. He fed it to the horse he called his "wife," as he visited her one last time.
Brown, 60, is a lifelong horseman, working as a trainer and a groom — and in any other capacity he could find around horses — since he was a child. For decades he worked at Fairmount Racetrack in Collinsville, caring for and training racehorses, including Dreymore.
Now he is a patient at Unity Hospice in Belleville, with lung cancer ...

Teen driving deaths have dropped by half in Illinois since the state passed the new graduated licensing laws, while fewer teenagers are getting their licenses early.
In 2007, there were 155 teen driving deaths between the ages of 16 and 19. In 2008, the state passed the graduated driver licensing system, which eases teens into driving with phases of gaining driving experience with a parent or guardian, limiting distractions such as cell phones, and letting teens earn their way from one phase ...

“Not on my campus.”

“We have more similarities than differences.”

“While we may come from different places and speak in different tongues, our hearts beat as one.”

These were some of the messages written on a door propped up in the quad Wednesday at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, as students responded to incidents of racism in the past week. A note with racial slurs was left on a student’s on-campus apartment door, and a Confederate flag was painted on the boulder in the middle of...

Court records for the man accused of painting swastikas on graves show a long history of crime, threats and time in and out of mental institutions — as well as accusations that he has been painting swastikas on churches since the beginning of April.
Timothy V. McLean, 34, of Glen Carbon, has been charged with multiple felonies alleging that he spray-painted more than 200 graves with swastikas at Sunset Hill Cemetery in Glen Carbon over Memorial Day weekend...

For 104 years, Crown Candy Kitchen has served overstuffed BLTs and thick shakes in north St. Louis, proud of its neighborhood.
But a recent satire piece on a Facebook page underscored something more than the usual jokes about the diner’s famously long lines, pounds of bacon stuffed into bread, and the chocolates lining its century-old counter: the perception of its neighborhood, and with it north St. Louis, as unsafe.
A Facebook page dedicated to mocking the city of Edwardsville posted a sati...