Sheridan G. Gorman (Via Instagram)
By William McGurn | Wall Street Journal
Sheridan Gorman should still be alive. The 18-year-old freshman should be with her family and catching them up on what’s new at Chicago’s Loyola University. Instead she’s gone, and this weekend her family came with moist eyes and broken hearts to her funeral at the First Presbyterian Church in her hometown of Yorktown, N.Y.
This family has been through the unspeakable: The light of their lives snuffed out before her time, cut down as Ms. Gorman gathered by the Chicago lakefront with friends to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights. The politicians who failed to protect her from a criminal have since compounded the pain with ill-conceived statements about who’s to blame. These statements—by the governor, the mayor, a Chicago alderwoman—weren’t intended to wound, but they did.
Our political class, apparently, has lost all sense of what’s important in moments like these. It’s become all about scoring political points against your enemies. Comforting the afflicted, supporting communities and individuals, all that comes later—or not at all. This is not normal.
Begin with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. A week ago he admitted there were “real failures” in the immigration and criminal-justice systems that led to this murder. The accused murderer is 25-year-old Jose Medina, a Venezuelan who crossed into the U.S. illegally amid the border chaos of the Biden years. He has been arrested and charged with Ms. Gorman’s murder.
Mr. Pritzker’s real message wasn’t the “real failures.” It was: This is Donald Trump’s fault, notwithstanding that there’s hardly a Republican to be found in Illinois. “I know that the Gorman family has suffered mightily,” the governor said. “I agree. 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.”
Alderwoman Maria Hadden told Fox32’s Chicago Live last week that Gorman “might have been a wrong-place-wrong-time, running into a person who had a gun. They might have startled this person at the end of the pier unintentionally.” Ms. Hadden has since apologized for suggesting the victim caused her own death while blaming media for “intentionally creating sound bites to misconstrue my words during this tragedy.”
Not to be outdone, Mayor Brandon Johnson gave a master class in deflection when asked if he would apologize to Gorman’s parents for her death. He then characterized it as “senseless violence.” This was followed by a filibuster, in which he said the city’s sanctuary status was established 40 years ago and was somehow shaped by a 2021 criminal justice reform, which he incorrectly said was passed under Gov. Bruce Rauner who was—wait for it—a Republican. (The law was signed by Gov. Pritzker.)
Finally he, too, went to the old reliable: Mr. Trump. “He points the finger at everything and everyone else versus doing some real self-reflection on what his responsibility is.”
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