Jose Medina, a 25-year-old illegal immigrant, has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old Loyola University Chicago freshman who was gunned down at the city's Tobey Prinz Beach early Thursday morning.
According to a news release from the Chicago Police Department, Medina faces first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, three counts of aggravated assault with discharge of a firearm, and aggravated unlawful possession of a weapon. Gorman was shot in the head while attempting to flee.
She was walking along the pier with friends around 1:30 a.m. when Medina allegedly approached them wearing a mask. After the shooting, he allegedly hid in a nearby apartment building.
Gorman was from Yorktown, New York. A private service is set to be held there on Saturday.
The timeline here is damning, and it requires no embellishment.
Medina was originally detained at the border in May 2023. He was released into the United States. He was then arrested in Chicago for shoplifting from a Macy's later that same year. He was released again, reported the New York Post.
Two encounters with the system. Two chances to remove a man who had no legal right to be in the country. Two failures. And now an 18-year-old college freshman is dead.
DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis did not mince words:
"[Gorman] was failed by open border policies and sanctuary politicians who released this illegal alien twice before he went on to commit this heinous murder."
That is not rhetoric. It is a statement of sequential fact. Medina was caught. Medina was let go. Medina was caught again. Medina was let go again. Medina killed Sheridan Gorman.
Chicago's sanctuary city framework exists to shield illegal immigrants from federal immigration enforcement. Its advocates frame this as compassionate, as a necessary firewall between vulnerable communities and deportation. What they never account for is the cost when the person being shielded is not vulnerable but dangerous.
This is the fundamental dishonesty of sanctuary policy. It treats every illegal immigrant as a sympathetic figure by default and constructs an entire legal architecture around that assumption. When the assumption fails, when the person shielded turns out to be someone who would shoot a teenage girl in the head on a lakefront pier, the architects of that policy go silent or pivot to abstraction.
Bis called directly on Illinois Governor Pritzker and Chicago's sanctuary politicians to act, reported WHMI:
"We are calling on Governor Pritzker and Chicago's sanctuary politicians to commit to not releasing this criminal illegal alien from jail back into American neighborhoods."
The fact that this even needs to be said reveals the depth of the problem. In a rational system, a foreign national charged with murder would not require a public appeal to keep him behind bars. But Chicago is not operating a rational system. It is operating an ideological one.
Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011. Whatever sentence Medina ultimately faces, it will not be the ultimate one. For a man who allegedly walked up to a group of young people on a beach, masked, and put a bullet in the head of a fleeing 18-year-old, the state has already decided the ceiling on justice.
That is a policy choice Illinois made long before this crime occurred. But cases like this are the ones that force voters to sit with what that choice actually means in practice.
Sheridan Gorman was a college freshman. She was doing what college freshmen do: spending a warm night on the lakefront with friends. She was not in a war zone. She was not engaged in criminal activity. She was strolling along a pier in one of America's great cities.
Every layer of the system that was supposed to prevent this failed her. Border enforcement caught Medina and let him go. Local law enforcement caught him again and let him go again. Sanctuary policy ensured that neither encounter triggered the removal that could have kept him out of the country, out of Chicago, and away from that pier.
The people who built that system owe Sheridan Gorman's family more than silence. They owe them an answer.
