Bagent leads Chicago to 34-21 preseason win over Chiefs; Bears' Coleman taken away on a stretcher

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Backup quarterback Tyson Bagent ran for a touchdown on the opening drive of the Bears' game against Kansas City on Thursday night, and Chicago went on to beat the Chiefs 34-21 in a preseason finale in which both teams sat nearly all their starters.

The game was halted briefly after the first play of the second half, when Bears cornerback Douglas Coleman III made a tackle along the Kansas City sideline and was left motionless on the ground. He was tended to by doctors as players from both teams took a knee, and eventually was immobilized on a stretcher and driven out of Arrowhead Stadium.

Bagent was 3 of 6 for 57 yards along with his TD run. The second-year pro has been competing with Brett Rypien, who took over late in the first quarter against Kansas City, for the job of backing up first overall draft pick Caleb Williams.

Reddy Steward picked off two passes for Chicago, bringing one back 48 yards for a touchdown.

Carson Steele had the most impressive night for the Chiefs. The undrafted rookie from UCLA made a good case to back up Isiah Pacheco, running four times for 50 yards. That included a 31-yard, tackle-breaking run to set up his own TD plunge.

Shortly before kickoff, the Chiefs agreed with Creed Humphrey on a four-year, $72 million extension, a person familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press. The contract includes $50 million guaranteed, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the paperwork for the richest contract for a center in NFL history had yet to be signed.

Humphrey watched from the sideline along with Patrick Mahomes, with whom he built a fast rapport after he was chosen in the second round of the 2021 draft. They were joined by most of the Chiefs' starters on both sides of the ball.

Jaylen Watson was among the few regulars who played for Kansas City. The cornerback, who is competing for a starting job, is coming off a torn labrum in his shoulder that had kept him out of the first two preseason games.

DeAndre Carter, who is trying to nail down punt return duties for Chicago, did not help his cause in the second quarter, when he let a punt bounce off his foot at his own 9. Carter was bailed out by Steward's pick a few plays later.

INJURIES

Bears: LT Larry Borom was carted off the field with a right leg injury with in the first quarter. He was listed as the backup at his position but was in line to make the 53-man roster as the swing tackle.

Chiefs: LT Wanya Morris was ruled out with a right knee injury in the first quarter. He was beaten out in camp by rookie Kingsley Suamataia for the starting job but was likely to make the team as a backup.

UP NEXT

Bears: Opens the regular season Sept. 8 against Tennessee.

Chiefs: Play the Ravens on Sept. 5 in a rematch of the AFC title game.

AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

The Chicago Bears gather around teammate Douglas Coleman III as he is treated after being injured during the second half of a preseason NFL football game, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024 in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Reed Hoffmann)

Chicago Bears defensive back Douglas Coleman III is taken off the field on a cart after being injured during the second half of an NFL preseason football game against the Kansas City Chiefs Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Chicago Bears safety Douglas Coleman III, bottom, is treated on the field after being injured during the second half of a preseason NFL football game against the Kansas City Chiefs, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024 in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Reed Hoffmann)

Kansas City Chiefs fullback Carson Steele, right, runs for a 31-yard gain as Chicago Bears defensive back Tarvarius Moore (30) defends during the first half of an NFL preseason football game Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Chicago Bears quarterback Brett Rypien throws during the first half of an NFL preseason football game against the Kansas City Chiefs Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Ed Zurga)

Chicago Bears wide receiver Tyler Scott (10) catches a 37-yard pass as Kansas City Chiefs cornerback Jaylen Watson (35) and safety Deon Bush (26) defend during the first half of an NFL preseason football game Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Chicago Bears running back Ian Wheeler, left, struggles for yardage against Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Cole Christiansen (48) and cornerback Kelvin Joseph, right, during the first half of an NFL preseason football game Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Kansas City Chiefs defensive back Jaden Hicks (21) celebrates after recovering a fumble during the first half of an NFL preseason football game against the Chicago Bears Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Chicago Bears quarterback Brett Rypien (11) scrambles as Kansas City Chiefs defensive tackle Matt Dickerson (93) defends during the first half of an NFL preseason football game Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Fans watch in the stands during the first half of an NFL preseason football game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Chicago Bears Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Chicago Bears head coach Matt Eberflus watches from the sidelines during the first half of an NFL preseason football game against the Kansas City Chiefs Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Kansas City Chiefs running back Deneric Prince (34) is stopped by a host of Chicago Bears players during the first half of an NFL preseason football game Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Ed Zurga)

Chicago Bears quarterback Tyson Bagent scores on a touchdown run during the first half of an NFL preseason football game against the Kansas City Chiefs Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Ed Zurga)

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Alberto Fujimori, whose decade-long presidency began with triumphs righting Peru’s economy and defeating a brutal insurgency only to end in autocratic excess that later sent him to prison, has died. He was 86.

His death Wednesday in the capital, Lima, was announced by his daughter, Keiko Fujimori, in a post on X.

Fujimori, who governed with an increasingly authoritarian hand in 1990-2000, was pardoned in December from his convictions for corruption and responsibility for the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he was planning to run for Peru’s presidency for the fourth time in 2026.

The former university president and mathematics professor was the consummate political outsider when he emerged from obscurity to win Peru’s 1990 election over writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Over a tumultuous political career, he repeatedly made risky, go-for-broke decisions that alternately earned him adoration and reproach.

He took over a country ravaged by runaway inflation and guerrilla violence, mending the economy with bold actions including mass privatizations of state industries. Defeating fanatical Shining Path rebels took a little longer but also won him broad-based support.

His presidency, however, collapsed just as dramatically.

After briefly shutting down Congress and elbowing himself into a controversial third term, he fled the country in disgrace in 2000 when leaked videotapes showed his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing lawmakers. The president went to Japan, the land of his parents, and famously faxed in his resignation.

He stunned supporters and foes alike five years later when he landed in neighboring Chile, where he was arrested and then extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peru’s presidency in 2006, but instead wound up in court facing charges of abuse of power.

The high-stakes political gambler would lose miserably. He became the first former president in the world to be tried and convicted in his own country for human rights violations. He was not found to have personally ordered the 25 death-squad killings for which he was convicted, but he was deemed responsible because the crimes were committed in his government’s name.

His 25-year sentence did not stop Fujimori from seeking political revindication, which he planned from a prison built in a police academy on the outskirts of Lima, the capital.

His congresswoman daughter Keiko tried in 2011 to restore the family dynasty by running for the presidency but was narrowly defeated in a runoff. She ran again in 2016 and 2021, when she lost by just 44,000 votes after a campaign in which she promised to free her father.

“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just departed to meet the Lord," she said on X Wednesday. "We ask those who loved him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul.”

Fujimori’s presidency was, in fact, a brash display of outright authoritarianism, known locally as “caudillismo,” in a region shakily stepping away from dictatorships toward democracy.

He is survived by his four children. The oldest, Keiko, became first lady in 1996 when his father divorced his mother, Susana Higuchi, in a bitter battle in which she accused Fujimori of having her tortured. The youngest child, Kenji, was elected a congressman.

Fujimori was born July 28, 1938, Peruvian Independence Day, and his immigrant parents picked cotton until they could open a tailor’s shop in downtown Lima.

He earned a degree in agricultural engineering in 1956, and then studied in France and the United States, where he received a graduate degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1972.

In 1984 he became rector of the Agricultural University in Lima, and six years later, he ran for president without ever having held political office, billing himself as a clean alternative to Peru’s corrupt, discredited political class.

He soared from 6% in the polls a month before the 1990 election to finish second out of nine in the balloting. He went on to beat Vargas Llosa in a runoff.

The victory, he later said, came from the same frustration that fueled the Shining Path.

“My government is the product of rejection, of being fed up with Peru because of the frivolity, corruption and nonfunctioning of the traditional political class and the bureaucracy,” he said.

Once in office, Fujimori’s tough talk and hands-on style at first won him only plaudits, as car bombings still ripped through the capital and annual inflation approached 8,000 percent.

He applied the same economic shock therapy that Vargas Llosa had advocated but he had argued against in the campaign.

Privatizing state-owned industries, Fujimori slashed public spending and attracted record foreign investment.

Known affectionately as “El chino,” due to his Asian ancestry, Fujimori often donned peasant garb to visit jungle Indigenous communities and highland farmers, while delivering electricity and drinking water to dirt-poor villages. That distinguished him from the patrician, white politicians who typically lacked his commoner’s touch.

Fujimori also gave Peru’s security forces free rein to take on the Shining Path.

In September 1992, police captured rebel leader Abimael Guzmán. Deservedly or not, Fujimori took credit.

Taking power just years after much of the region had shed dictatorships, the former university professor ultimately represented a step back. He developed a growing taste for power and resorted to increasingly anti-democratic means to amass more of it.

In April 1992, he shut down Congress and the courts, accusing them of shackling his efforts to defeat the Shining Path and spur economic reforms.

International pressure forced him to call elections for an assembly to replace the Congress. The new legislative body, dominated by his supporters, changed Peru’s constitution to allow the president to serve two consecutive five-year terms. Fujimori was swept back into office in 1995, after a brief border war with Ecuador, in an election landslide.

Human rights advocates at home and abroad blasted him for pushing through a general amnesty law forgiving human rights abuses committed by security forces during Peru’s “anti-subversive” campaign between 1980 and 1995.

The conflict would claim nearly 70,000 lives, a truth commission found, with the military responsible for more than a third of the deaths. Journalists and businessmen were kidnapped, students disappeared and at least 2,000 highland peasant women were forcibly sterilized.

In 1996, Fujimori’s majority bloc in Congress put him on the path for a third term when it approved a law that determined his first five years as president didn’t count because the new constitution was not yet in place when he was elected.

A year later, Fujimori’s Congress fired three Constitutional Tribunal judges who tried to overturn the legislation, and his foes accused him of imposing a democratically elected dictatorship.

By then, almost daily revelations were showing the monumental scale of corruption around Fujimori. About 1,500 people connected to his government were prosecuted on corruption and other charges, including eight former Cabinet ministers, three former military commanders, an attorney general and a former chief of the Supreme Court.

The accusations against Fujimori led to years of legal wrangling. In December, Peru’s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a humanitarian pardon granted to Fujimori on Christmas Eve in 2017 by then-President Pablo Kuczynski. Wearing a face mask and getting supplemental oxygen, Fujimori walked out of the prison door and got in a sport utility vehicle driven by his daughter-in-law.

The last time he was seen in public was on Sept. 4, leaving a private hospital in a wheelchair. He told the press that he had undergone a CT scan and when asked if his presidential candidacy was still going ahead, he smiled and said “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

Frank Bajak, the principal writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2024. Associated Press writer Regina Garcia Cano in Mexico City contributed.

Supporters of former President Alberto Fujimori gather outside the home of his daughter Keiko, the day after he died in Lima, Peru, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Guadalupe Pardo)

Supporters of former President Alberto Fujimori gather outside the home of his daughter Keiko, the day after he died in Lima, Peru, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Guadalupe Pardo)

Pallbearers carry the coffin of former President Alberto Fujimori from the home of his daughter Keiko, the day after he died in Lima, Peru, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Guadalupe Pardo)

Keiko Fujimori, right, and her brother Kenji stand by as pallbearers carry the coffin of their father, former President Alberto Fujimori, out of Keiko's home the day after he died in Lima, Peru, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Guadalupe Pardo)

FILE - Peruvian presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori poses for a photo, April 8, 1990. His daughter Keiko Fujimori announced in a post on X that he died of cancer on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Fred Savariau, File)

FILE - Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori gives a press conference in front of the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru, April 22, 1997. His daughter Keiko Fujimori announced in a post on X that he died of cancer on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)

FILE - Peru's former President Alberto Fujimori, center, is driven out of prison by one of his lawyers, accompanied by his son Kenji, left, after his release, in Callao, Peru, Dec. 6, 2023. His daughter Keiko Fujimori announced in a post on X that he died of cancer on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia, File)

FILE - Chilean police officers surround former Peru's President Alberto Fujimori, left, as he leaves his house in Santiago to be extradited to Peru to face human rights and corruption charges, early Sept. 22, 2007. His daughter Keiko Fujimori announced in a post on X that he died of cancer on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Claudio Santana, File)

FILE - New Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori waves to supporters at the government palace, July 28, 1990. His daughter Keiko Fujimori announced in a post on X that he died of cancer on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Alejandro Balaguer, File)

FILE - Presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori waves to supporters after casting his vote during a presidential runoff against novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in Lima, Peru, June 10, 1990. His daughter Keiko Fujimori announced in a post on X that he died of cancer on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Recart, File)

FILE - Peru's jailed, former President Alberto Fujimori, photographed through a glass window, attends his trial at a police base on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, June 28, 2016. His daughter Keiko Fujimori announced in a post on X that he died of cancer on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia, File)

FILE - Former Peru's President Alberto Fujimori waves at his home in Santiago after leaving the academy for the training of corrections officers in Santiago, Chile, May 18, 2006. (AP Photo/Claudio Santana, File)

FILE - Peru's former President Alberto Fujimori is seen gesturing on a screen during the first day of his trial on charges of alleged human rights violations and corruption during his government at a police base in Lima, Dec. 10, 2007. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia, File)