Some Loyola Students Call To Improve Off-campus Safety And Emergency Alerts In Wake Of Freshman’s Murder

Like most Thursdays, Lilyana Halter was riding the Loyola University Chicago shuttle bus on March 19 when she got an email from the school that made her stomach drop.

Following an early-morning message from Loyola’s police force alerting students of a fatal shooting less than a mile from the Rogers Park campus, Loyola president Mark Reed informed students that an 18-year-old freshman, Sheridan Gorman, had been killed.

“Oh no,” Halter recalls thinking. “The homicide was one of us.”

That morning, students nudged each other in class, shocked, asking “Did you see the email?” Some professors began classes with tears in their eyes or a moment of silence honoring Gorman, students said.

“It’s so hard to explain the weird emotions I felt,” Halter said. She didn’t know Gorman personally, but she still felt a connection to her classmate. “She’s a Loyola Rambler.”

Since the killing, Halter has stopped walking home from her off-campus job in Rogers Park. It hasn’t felt safe. She’s noticed other students rethinking their decisions to walk around the neighborhood at night, too.

In campus-wide emails about the shooting, Loyola reminded students about its police patrols and mental health resources.

But Halter and other students question why Loyola didn’t step up security or take other safety precautions as students grieved the loss of their classmate. Some students said they would like to see beefed-up patrols at the beach where Gorman was killed and faster alerts when violent crimes happen near campus.

“Honestly, I just need to see something out of Loyola,” Halter said. “I can't have them just repeating the same things that we've always had, because it's not working.”

Gorman’s parents said they don’t fault Loyola for the shooting and said their daughter was happy and felt safe at school. Still, the shooting has raised fresh questions about the level of responsibility Loyola has to protect its students on and near campus. Its urban setting is one of Loyola’s biggest selling points, but it also means students, like other Chicago residents, aren’t insulated from crime.

A Loyola spokesperson didn’t respond to multiple requests to interview Reed or a list of questions about the school’s response to the shooting. But in a March 26 email obtained by the Sun-Times, Loyola officials told students: “Your safety and that of our entire community is always our top priority.”

How students say Loyola could have done better in wake of Gorman’s death

Gorman was with a group of friends taking pictures of the Chicago skyline at Tobey Prinz Beach Park when the shooting happened. Loyola’s private police force, Campus Safety, patrols the area surrounding campus, including the block on West Pratt Boulevard where Gorman was shot.

Gorman’s family has maintained Loyola is a safe place for students.

“We’ve also been asked whether students should feel safe there. The answer is yes,” Gorman’s parents said in a statement through their attorney, Thomas Tripodianos. “What happened to Sheridan was not a reflection of the Loyola community. It was the result of a failure outside of it.”

Still, current students say Loyola could inform students more quickly when violent crime happens and provide more information in follow-up communication.

In the case of Gorman’s killing, Loyola police sent a crime alert informing students and staff of the shooting at 4:41 a.m., more than three hours after the 1:30 a.m. shooting. Reed’s email identifying Gorman, sent at 9:10 that morning, told students there was “no ongoing threat to our campus community.” But no one was in police custody at the time, and some students worried that the suspect could still be armed near campus.

Some students, like junior Akanksha Bhanti, said students would have benefitted from getting the alert about Gorman’s shooting sooner.

“Who’s awake at 4:45 in the morning?” Bhanti said. “But it’s a very great chance that somebody’s awake at 1:30 or 2 in the morning, maybe walking around.”

Loyola officials announced a vigil in Gorman’s honor and reminded students of how to contact counselors through the school’s wellness center and campus ministry.

But several students wondered why classes weren’t canceled on the Rogers Park campus when the suspect was still at large — and wouldn’t be arrested for another three days.

“We all have class at 8 a.m. … That’s just hours later,” Bhanti said. “Nobody’s in custody, and you’re telling us that there’s no threat to the school.”

Student concerns about violent crime near campus aren’t new

Loyola and other urban colleges, including the University of Chicago, have long grappled with how to balance the safety of students while respecting the rights of residents who live in the surrounding neighborhood, especially when it comes to policing.

Loyola’s police force has jurisdiction over campus and roughly a half square mile of the surrounding neighborhood, including the beach where Gorman was shot and where students often spend time late at night.

“It could have been any of us,” said sophomore Noah King, whose dorm is a seven-minute walk from the park.

Loyola’s communication about the shooting noted that it wasn’t on campus. But some students say that doesn’t absolve the school of its responsibility to protect students, especially if it’s within the limits of where campus police patrol.

“Obviously it’s not Loyola's fault that she got shot,” Bhanti said. “It kind of feels like Loyola is using the fact that it, geographically, wasn’t technically on campus to not have to do as much about it.”

Loyola deals with violent crime not infrequently. Rogers Park ranks in the middle among Chicago’s 77 community areas when it comes to the rate at which residents are shot or killed, according to data compiled by the Sun-Times.

And this isn’t the first time a Loyola student has been shot and killed near campus. In 2014, a Loyola graduate student was the target of an attempted robbery on West Albion Avenue, steps from the Rogers Park campus. The student, Mutahir Rauf, didn’t believe the gun was real and tried to grab it, and the suspect fired, the Sun-Times reported at the time. Following that shooting, students expressed similar concerns about their safety.

“To know that someone was shot point blank so close to where I’m taking classes is not a very comfortable feeling,” Luigi Loizzo, then a Loyola junior, told the Sun-Times at the time.

In 2018, a student was brutally beaten and robbed blocks from the Rogers Park campus and Loyola didn’t send an alert to students, according to reporting by the Loyola Phoenix, the school’s student newspaper.

In August and September that year, six violent crimes were reported near Loyola’s campuses without email alerts sent to students, prompting the newspaper’s staff, which included this reporter at the time, to pen an editorial demanding the university alert students when violent crime happens on campus and where students are likely to be nearby.

Last October, three students reported being robbed at gunpoint outside a Loyola residence hall. They told the Loyola Phoenix that the incident left them nervous to leave their dorms at night, even to go elsewhere on campus.

These kinds of incidents have prompted Loyola students to ask for faster and more reliable pickup times for the school’s free shared ride system, known as 8-RIDE, which some students have relied on more heavily since Gorman was killed, students say.

Loyola advises students to be patient and plan in advance when they need a ride, but students say the ride often takes more than 30 minutes to arrive and sometimes leaves them hanging after campus buildings close.

In 2018, following two fatal shootings police believed were carried out by the same man in Rogers Park, multiple students reported calling a ride that never showed, the Loyola Phoenix reported.

Halter, who commutes to campus, said the 8-RIDE also has a limited pickup and dropoff zone. The shuttles don’t reach her home, for example, even though it’s in Rogers Park.

As shooting became national news, Loyola returned to normal on social media

Jose Medina, a 25-year-old Venezuelan migrant, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in Gorman’s killing. After that, the shooting gained national attention, including from President Donald Trump and other conservative politicians who blamed the shooting on Chicago’s sanctuary city policies and immigration policies enacted under President Joe Biden.

In the days following the shooting, Loyola appeared to return to business as usual on its Instagram account, including with a post celebrating the start of spring days after Gorman’s death. More than 100 students, parents, alumni and others blasted the school for being disrespectful in the wake of a tragedy.

“Expected from the Loyola administration, just as tone deaf and inactive as always,” one commenter wrote. “The disconnect between them and the students is as clear as ever.”

To Halter it felt like “they let a student be dead for a day, and now it doesn't matter anymore to them.”

“But it does matter because people knew her,” Halter said. “People are still mourning her.”

Loyola published another post captioned “In all things, we are called to find God — in sorrow and in hope, in grief and in community.” That also sparked criticism from students, saying the post was too vague and should have referenced Gorman directly.

Harmonson and others say it feels like Loyola is trying to uphold its image and avoid being seen as an unsafe place.

Halter, too, worries prospective students are being left in the dark. She’s thought about approaching a campus tour and asking: “Did you guys know that a homicide happened last week?”

“I haven't yet, but I've been really tempted to,” Halter said, “because I don't think that these people going on tours to see our campus and potentially go here should be misinformed.”