SHERIDAN Gorman’s face has haunted me ever since I first saw it online. It’s a rather nice face, actually quite a lovely face, the face of a vivacious young woman on the cusp of adult life and independence. It’s the face of a young woman other young women would like to befriend, and that teachers would be happy to have in their classes. I suspect it’s also the face of someone who had much to give, was a benefit and a blessing to all who knew her, and someone who went out of her way to serve others and put them at their ease, able to elevate the collective mood of any room she entered.
I refer to her in the past tense because 18-year-old Sheridan, a freshman at Loyola University in Chicago, is dead. She was shot on March 19 while she and her friends were walking along a pier near their campus in the city’s Rogers Park area.
After her murder, her parents wrote the following: ‘She was full of life, full of kindness, and full of a love that she gave freely to everyone around her . . . She made people feel seen. She made people feel valued. Whether it was her friends, her family, or someone she had just met, Sheridan had a way of leaving people better than she found them.’
The man accused of her murder, 25-year-old Venezuelan Jose Medina-Medina, entered the country illegally on May 9, 2023. He was apprehended but was then released under the Biden administration. After living in Texas briefly, he requested to be returned to Colombia, where he used to live, but was put on a bus instead and sent to Chicago, where he lived in a migrant shelter in which he apparently contracted tuberculosis.
According to Chicago Alderwoman Maria Hadden, Sheridan Gorman was in ‘the wrong place at the wrong time’, speculating further that Medina-Medina might have been ‘startled’ by Sheridan and her friends as they reached the end of the pier. An outrageous and staggeringly cruel comment that seems to place some blame on the victim, something that is not uncommon in contemporary America – providing, that is, it conforms to the established narratives.
The only person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Alderwoman Hadden, was Medina-Medina, an illegal alien who should not have been in the country.
It will probably surprise no one that Chicago is a so-called sanctuary city, a jurisdiction that restricts co-operation with federal immigration authorities (ICE or Border Control) to protect illegal aliens, including hardened criminals, from deportation. In other words, a city in violation of federal law. As best as I can tell, there are more than 1,000 such jurisdictions in America in 2026, which include counties and states. Illinois, the strongly Democrat state where Chicago is located, is a sanctuary state.
Illinois Governor J B Pritzker, despite calling Sheridan’s murder a ‘terrible tragedy’, did not hesitate to point at Trump. He said: ‘There have been real failures. Those failures, of course, extend beyond the borders of Illinois. There [are] national failures, a failure to have comprehensive immigration reform, a failure of the president to follow his own edict to go after the worst of the worst.’ Incidentally, when Democratic politicians call for ‘comprehensive immigration reform’, they are really advocating open borders.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also jumped on to the shift-the-blame, damage-control bandwagon. Having waited five days after Sheridan’s murder before issuing an official statement, he described the killing as an act of ‘senseless violence’, as if it emerged from the ether, and completely ignoring the crime’s etiology – sanctuary cities and states, an open border during the Biden administration, the alleged perpetrator not being deported – for which he is partly to blame, prompting her family to release a statement in response, a statement so trenchant and beautifully written that I feel justified in quoting it in full:
‘We acknowledge Mayor Johnson’s statement five days after our daughter Sheridan’s murder and his condolences to our family, as well as his recognition of the work of the Chicago Police Department.
‘But what happened to Sheridan cannot be reduced to a “senseless tragedy”, nor can it be explained in general terms about public safety. Sheridan was doing something entirely normal – walking near her campus with friends. She should be here.
‘This was not random. It was not inevitable. And it cannot be treated as though it were.
‘We appreciate the efforts of law enforcement in making an arrest. But safety is not defined by how quickly a case is solved after the fact. It is defined by whether a young woman like Sheridan is protected in the first place.
‘Our daughter was not in the wrong place at the wrong time. The system failed her.
‘Calling this “senseless” is not enough. There must be a clear and honest accounting of what went wrong.
‘We are not interested in rhetoric. We are asking for accountability.
‘We will not allow Sheridan’s life to be reduced to a talking point or a generalisation. We expect leadership that is willing to confront hard truths and ensure that what happened to her does not happen again.’
Because the narrative does not match the progressive agenda – young American white woman murdered by an illegal immigrant from Latin America – the legacy media has virtually ignored Sheridan’s tragic death. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the three major cable networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – devoted just over a combined three minutes on what happened to Sheridan, with NBC managing just 23 seconds.
There are many deeply troubling aspects to this story. Why, for example, was the alleged murderer sent to Chicago despite wanting to return to Colombia? And then there are the unseemly aspects and the shameless attempts at obfuscation, as we saw above, and how these attempts speak volumes about the appalling moral state of contemporary America.
Speaking of such, I feel impelled to mention the response of the Loyola Phoenix, the student newspaper of Loyola University, Chicago.
On March 23, the Phoenix’s Instagram page included the following headline: ‘Immigrant Man Charged in Murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS Involved’. Using language provided by the Department of Homeland Security, the newspaper also referred to the alleged killer as an ‘illegal immigrant’, which of course he is. Within minutes the headline was taken down in order ‘to prevent any further harm to affected community members’, explained Editor-in-Chief Lilli Malone, adding that ‘such language does not align with the values of this newspaper’. She went on: ‘No human’s existence is illegal, and we quickly changed our wording to reflect that.’
With all due respect, Miss Malone, you are a foolish and thoughtless little girl. The harm of which you speak has already been done; it is an irreversible harm. Sheridan had her young life snatched from her, and nothing will bring her back. It is has also done irreparable harm to those who loved her and are now left to mourn her for the rest of their lives. Notwithstanding your virtue-signalling bilge about no humans being illegal, one calculation estimates that at least 20,000 Americans ‘have been killed by illegal migrants in crimes and auto accidents since 2000’.
At a ‘No Kings’ rally in Chicago last Saturday, the day Sheridan was buried, Mayor Johnson vowed to end assaults on immigrants.
Need I say more?
