Facial recognition technology helped Chicago police identify the man who murdered a street pastor who regularly rode CTA trains at night to offer homeless riders a place to sleep, prosecutors say. The arrest comes as some lawmakers are trying to outlaw the use of facial recognition by state and local law enforcement agencies across Illinois.
Michael Wilson, 25, is charged with first-degree murder in the December killing of Chad Schenk, a 41-year-old street pastor who prosecutors said often rode CTA trains to connect unhoused people with shelter.
According to a detention filing, Schenk and Wilson were strangers when they met aboard an inbound Blue Line train during the early morning hours of December 14, 2025. Prosecutors said Schenk offered Wilson a place to stay for the night, and Wilson accepted.
CTA surveillance footage allegedly showed the two men leaving the UIC-Halsted Blue Line station at about 12:50 a.m. and additional video captured them walking to Schenk’s apartment in the 700 block of South Carpenter Street. Prosecutors said the video showed Wilson was wearing a “zombie bear” backpack.
Once inside the apartment, Schenk gave Wilson drinks, and Wilson took a shower before going to sleep on makeshift pallets made of blankets on the floor, according to prosecutors.
During later police questioning, Wilson said he woke up during the night and saw Schenk touching his own nipple, according to prosecutors. Wilson went back to sleep but woke again to find Schenk sitting with his back against the wall and his legs intertwinced with Wilson’s, prosecutors said.
Wilson allegedly told investigators he “freaked out,” causing Schenk to jump up. Wilson responded by firing eight shots into Schenk’s face and neck with a gun he had hidden beneath a blanket, according to the allegations. He then left the apartment, prosecutors said.
A longtime friend of Schenk’s became concerned after not hearing from him for a couple of days and called 911 to request a well-being check. Responding officers found Schenk’s apartment door open and discovered him dead.
Investigators used location data from Schenk’s cellphone to track his movements to the Blue Line. From there, they pulled CTA video and realized he left the train with another man, so they fed images of that man into the Secretary of State’s facial recognition system, prosecutors said. The system returned what prosecutors described as a “positive match” for Wilson.
Coincidentally, on New Year’s Eve, officers patrolling the Jackson Red Line station arrested Wilson for allegedly carrying a handgun, 14 rounds of ammunition, and a drum magazine inside the same “zombie bear” backpack seen in surveillance footage, prosecutors said. He was also wearing the same clothing he allegedly wore on the night of Schenk’s killing. Wilson was on parole at the time and had an outstanding parole warrant, prosecutors said.
Authorities later determined that the gun recovered during the Red Line arrest was the weapon used to kill Schenk, prosecutors said. Wilson has remained detained on the gun case since his December 31 arrest. Judge Deidre Dyer granted prosecutors’ request to detain Wilson on the murder charge, too.
Court records show Wilson also has prior convictions. In November 2024, he was convicted of battery for attacking a stranger near Rush Street and Chicago Avenue, punching the victim multiple times, chasing him, and kicking him, prosecutors said. He received a 100-day sentence.
At the time of that attack, Wilson was already serving first-time weapon offender probation in a separate felony gun case. That charge originated from an arrest in April 2024 when officers responding to a report of a person with a gun in the 900 block of South Halsted Street recovered a loaded firearm from Wilson after a witness pointed him out to police.
Wilson’s arrest is the latest to be assisted by facial recognition technology, an investigative tool that a North Side lawmaker is trying to ban. Rep. Kelly Cassidy’s bill would prohibit any local or state law enforcement agency in Illinois from accessing a facial recognition database and would bar agencies from sidestepping that prohibition by contracting the work to a third party.
The bill failed to advance out of the Illinois House Judiciary – Civil Committee before the body adjourned in March and was sent back to the Rules Committee. But it has picked up three new co-sponsors, all from Chicago — Rep. Kevin Olickal from the Far North Side, Rep. Lilian Jiménez of Humboldt Park, and Rep. Diane Blair-Sherlock of Villa Park — suggesting the effort is not finished.
CWB Chicago previously reported on dozens of violent crimes, many from the CTA, in which Chicago detectives developed critical leads by feeding surveillance images into facial recognition databases, frequently the dataset maintained by the Illinois Secretary of State.
Those cases included murders, rapes, robberies, and kidnappings. Just days after that report, investigators used facial recognition to help identify Jose Miranda, the man accused of murdering Loyola University freshman Sheridan Gorman near Loyola Beach — a crime that occurred in Cassidy’s own district.
Last month, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke pointed to facial recognition as one of the important tools used to fight crime on the CTA.
Cassidy dismissed CWB Chicago’s detailed, case-specific reporting of murders, rapes, and robberies solved with the assistance of facial recognition as “anecdotes” and called it “curious that in discussing this issue, we hear about particularly heinous and troubling crimes, but nothing about people being misidentified by facial recognition technology and held for hours — if not days — based on system errors.”
Supporters and critics of the bill agree on at least one thing: they’ve been unable to find an example of anyone being criminally charged in Illinois based on a potential facial recognition match without corroborating evidence.
Detectives use a match as a starting point to build leads, not as a basis for charges, said Tom Weitzel, the retired police chief in suburban Riverside. He called the technology “one of the most important investigative tools to come along in policing in 50 years” and said Cassidy’s bill “doesn’t regulate facial recognition — it destroys it.”
The ACLU of Illinois supports the ban and acknowledges it would end law enforcement’s use of the tool entirely. Some observers are pressing for a middle path instead: codifying best practices, prohibiting arrests based solely on a facial recognition match, requiring officer training and certification, and mandating that biometric data belonging to anyone cleared as a suspect be purged within 72 hours.
An ACLU representative also acknowledged that the organization has found no examples of anyone being criminally charged in Illinois based solely on a facial recognition match with no corroborating evidence, though he added that a lack of public reporting on how the tools are used makes it difficult to know the full picture.
Original reporting you’ll see nowhere else, paid for by our readers. Click here to support our work.
