Sheridan Gorman’s murder – and Chicago’s silence

The cold-blooded execution of Loyola University freshman Sheridan Gorman last week has sparked heartbreak and outrage across the country – including condemnation by President Donald Trump outside Air Force One on Monday morning – as yet another American family is shattered by an illegal immigrant allowed into the country during the Biden administration.

At approximately 1:15 a.m. on March 19, Gorman, who is from New York state, and a group of friends were walking on a pier about a mile from Loyola’s Chicago campus when a masked man confronted the group, who were reportedly at the beach to see the Northern Lights. As Gorman turned to flee, the gunman fired a single shot into her back; she died at the scene.

Over the weekend, Chicago police arrested Jose Medina-Medina, a citizen of Venezuela. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Medina-Medina was apprehended at the border in 2023 and later released. A month later, Medina was arrested for shoplifting at a downtown department store; he never showed up for his court date.

Medina, 25, also did not appear in a Chicago courtroom on Monday afternoon as originally expected to face six felony charges including first-degree murder; he is reportedly quarantined in an area hospital with a suspected case of tuberculosis or other communicable disease. Following his arrest, Immigration and Customs Enforcement placed a detainer on Medina-Medina and asked city officials to keep him behind bars.

Once upon a time, a shocking crime of this nature would have had the Chicago media on overdrive with hungry reporters demanding answers from elected officials and editorial boards lamenting the loss of a vibrant young life in such a cruel, inhumane manner. That, however, is not the case this time.

The Chicago Sun-Times is justifiably taking flak for the “wrong place, wrong time” headline the paper used for its initial report on Gorman’s murder. While the paper was quoting a witness who had told reporters, “We were just [in the] wrong place, wrong time,” editors nonetheless chose that victim-blaming comment over several other more accurate descriptions of the heinous murder for the headline that accompanied a smiling photo of Gorman alongside Loyola’s mascot. The paper’s website on Monday criticized the president’s comments about Gorman and claimed that “the Trump administration has used the deaths of other young women to make a case that undocumented immigration puts Americans in danger,” which the paper went on to dispute.

The Chicago Tribune hasn’t performed much better. At first describing Medina as a “Rogers Park man” – conjuring up memories of the media’s description of illegal immigrant Kilmar Ábrego García as a “Maryland man” or “Maryland dad” – the Trib omitted Gorman’s murder on the front page of its widely-read Sunday edition; Monday’s issue of the Tribune relegated the tragedy to a one-sentence mention at the bottom of the front page. In fact, Gorman’s murder has not made front-page news at the Tribune since it happened.

A single Tribune editorial posted on March 20, before Medina’s arrest, lamented that Gorman’s murder might hamper the city’s college recruitment efforts. “When an incident this awful happens at any of our universities, the concerning ripple effect is that parents of future collegians will bypass Chicago in favor of places they feel confident their kids will be safe,” the editorial board wrote.

Since then – radio silence at the paper’s once-vaunted editorial page.

The city’s other news outlets offered similarly short shrift to the tragedy. WGN has only four articles about Gorman’s murder on its webpage; a Monday morning update described Medina as being “of Chicago” and offered a single sentence as to his immigration status.

And there is not a single article covering Gorman’s murder on the website of WTTW, the Chicago affiliate of the Public Broadcasting System.

Gorman’s family, in a heartbreaking post, described Sheridan,18, as the “heart of their family.” They also took aim at any suggestion their daughter and sister had it coming.

“What happened to Sheridan cannot be reduced to the idea of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

But that appears to represent the prevailing opinion of major Chicago media outlets. Otherwise, what could possibly excuse the shameful blackout of Gorman’s murder aside from protecting the city officials responsible for the circumstances leading up to it?

Further, if Gorman was in the wrong place at the wrong time – what about the young mom who was just mugged in one of the city’s nicest neighborhoods in broad daylight at 9 a.m. as she dropped her toddler off at day care? Or another young woman violently robbed at gunpoint on her way to a yoga class at 5 a.m. in Lincoln Park earlier this month? Or the man recently robbed at gunpoint in the middle of a Friday afternoon in the city’s poshest shopping district?

The insidious effect of local media’s near blackout of the story is not just defining deviancy down but ignoring it altogether. It’s a “shut up and take it” message by the media to the residents of Chicago – and even to the family of a young girl attending her dream school shot dead by a criminal illegal who should never have been in the city in the first place.