Late last year, a man named Lawrence Reed was arrested for setting a woman on fire aboard a Chicago commuter train. It wasn’t his first arrest, mind you, or his second. Or his 62nd.
No, Reed had a grand total of 72 arrests that could be counted in his 50 years upon this earth — including one just a few months prior for assaulting a social worker in which the judge, when told Reed was a threat who couldn’t be safely monitored out of a carceral facility, told the prosecutor that “I can’t keep everybody in jail because the state’s attorney wants me to.”
Reed was jailed without bail in that case, in which the 26-year-old woman was burned over 50 percent of her body. But Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wasn’t about to let people tell him that he needed to change the laws to ensure that ultra-recidivists stayed behind bars. Why?
“We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence,” Johnson told the media. “We’ve already tried that, and we’ve ended up with the largest prison population in the world without solving the problems of crime and violence.”
Also, thinking you could do so was racist: “The addiction on jails and incarceration in this country — we have moved past that,” he added. “It is racist, it is immoral, it is unholy, and it is not the way to drive violence down.”
Chicago Mayor Johnson: “We cannot jail our way out of vioIent crime… it’s racist”
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 23, 2026
Not that you needed an object lesson to prove that this is deeply stupid and insane — a priori logic would tell you that, yes, you can jail yourself out of violent crime, and it is indeed the most consistently effective way of doing so — but we tragically have one: Sheridan Gorman.
Gorman, 18, a freshman at Loyola College in Chicago, was killed on Thursday when she and some friends walked down to Toby Prinz Beach pier hoping to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights, according to WLS-TV.
Her alleged killer is 25-year-old Jose Medina, a Venezuelan in this country illegally. Police say they were able to capture him due to facial recognition images from U.S. Customs and Border Protection files.
And, wouldn’t you know it, not only was he in the country illegally but he had a criminal record — and had stopped appearing in court.
According to WLS, after Medina was first arrested by Border Patrol in 2023, he was arrested again for retail theft in Chicago.
He didn’t appear for those charges, and an arrest warrant was issued — although how much was done to follow up on this is unclear.
Federal officials say he should have never been released, period, after the first arrest by Chicago police.
In other words: He shouldn’t have been in the country, he should have been arrested and detained after he allegedly committed another illegal act after illegally entering the country, he wasn’t, and now he’s allegedly killed an 18-year-old and faces first-degree murder charges.
Why did he do it? According to Chicago Alderwoman Maria Hadden, a Democrat, Medina might have been “startled” by Gorman, who “was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“They go out on the pier, they walk around. The kids were out doing normal things people do in the neighborhood, and it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time. Running into a person who had a gun,” she said.
Who shouldn’t have been in the country and shouldn’t have been a free man if he was.
“We are gravely disappointed by the policies and failures that allowed this individual to remain in a position to commit this crime,” Gorman’s family said in a statement.
“When systems fail — whether through release decisions, lack of coordination, or unwillingness to act — the consequences are not abstract. They are real. And in our case, they are permanent.”
So, is Mayor Johnson going to offer an apology to the family of this murdered innocent? Clearly, you don’t know how the man operates from the first outrage, apparently:
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) REFUSES to apologize to the family of 18yo Sheridan Gorman, who was reportedly M*RDERED by a criminal illegal alien in his city.
His sanctuary polices PROTECT foreign criminals.
DISGUSTINGpic.twitter.com/RMdWu7a0uK https://t.co/xovoJuw4s9
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 24, 2026
Talk around it all you want, Mayor Johnson. The fact is, you can jail your way out of crime, you can deport your way out of crime, and this is neither racist nor unfair. In fact, the only “immoral” thing is to allow for a sanctuary city that refuses to jail criminals so that they can commit crime again.
How many more innocent people must die before Democrats learn this lesson?
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