Venezuelan migrant arrested after teen is fatally shot near Loyola Chicago Campus

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We have learned more about the Venezuelan migrant being questioned by Chicago police in connection with the murder of Loyola University freshman Sheridan Gorman, who was shot in an apparently random and unprovoked attack on the pier at Loyola Beach this week.

CWB Chicago reported Saturday evening that Chicago police detained a 25-year-old man around 9 p.m. Friday while executing a search warrant at an apartment building in the 6800 block of North Sheridan Road, less than two blocks from the pier in Rogers Park. The search turned up a firearm that was sent to a ballistics laboratory to determine whether it fired the bullet that struck Gorman, who was killed by a single shot to the torso, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday they had found no indication of any provocation or altercation leading up to the shooting. When Gorman and her friends crossed paths with the gunman near the pier’s light beacon at 1:11 a.m. Thursday, he was wearing a ski mask or other face covering. He fired once, striking Gorman in the torso, though CPD initially reported she had been shot in the head. Detectives used footage from multiple cameras to track the suspect to the apartment building, where additional footage captured him without the face covering, and someone associated with the building recognized him, sources said.

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Court records show he was arrested in mid-June 2023 for allegedly shoplifting merchandise worth $132 from the Macy’s at 111 North State Street in the Loop. Arrest records show he listed 1222 West Touhy Avenue in Rogers Park as his home address at the time — the address of Leone Beach Park, where the fieldhouse had been converted into a migrant shelter by City Hall. Leone Beach Park forms the north end of Loyola Beach.

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Gorman’s family issued a statement Saturday morning pushing back on a Sun-Times headline that characterized her death as “WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME.”

“She was exactly where she should have been — close to campus, surrounded by friends, living her life,” the family said, noting she and her friends had gone to the lakefront hoping to see the Northern Lights. “What happened to Sheridan cannot be reduced to the idea of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is not an abstraction. This is the loss of a daughter. The loss of a sister. The loss of a future filled with milestones that will now never come. Our family is forever changed.”

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