Another Chicago child is dead, and the man running the city can’t even bring himself to say her name.
Seven-year-old Eddimar Paola Hernandez Chacon was walking with her sister in Chicago’s East Chatham neighborhood on Oct. 3 when 48-year-old Shavon Gayden, a stranger to the girls, approached and stabbed her multiple times in the back, Townhall reports. The sisters had just walked out of a store where they had gone to pay a phone bill.
Bystanders jumped in and held Gayden until police arrived, but it was too late. Eddimar was pronounced dead at Comer Children’s Hospital just after 1 p.m. that Saturday.
Here’s the part that should make every Chicagoan furious: Gayden was no mystery to the system. According to Townhall, she was known to authorities, had a lengthy criminal record and had an active warrant out for her arrest. Let that sink in. The city had her name. It had a warrant. And she was still on the street, close enough to a 7-year-old girl to put a knife in her back.
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s response was a post on X saying he was “heartbroken by the killing of a 7-year-old Chicago girl who was simply walking down the street with her family.” He sent his “deepest condolences” to “this little girl’s family and loved ones” and promised that “The City will continue to work closely with the Chicago Police Department as this investigation moves forward.” Not once did he write her name.
That isn’t a one-off. Chicago journalist William Kelly, who says he questions Johnson at City Hall every week, told Townhall the mayor has done this before. “You had Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old Loyola University College student, shot dead and called it … he won’t even say her name,” Kelly said. “The last time I went to ask him about that particular case, he wouldn’t even say Sheridan Gorman’s name, and when I challenged him to say her name, he wouldn’t.”
Kelly also pointed to Bethany MaGee, a 20-year-old college student set on fire on the CTA, an attack he said Johnson called an “isolated incident.” “And now we have this 7-year-old little girl,” Kelly said. “How many isolated incidents add up to a serious problem in Chicago?”
None of this should surprise anyone who has listened to Johnson talk about crime. This is the same mayor who said, “Jails and incarceration and law enforcement is a sickness that has not led to safe communities.” When the man in charge treats locking up dangerous people as the disease, people with long records and open warrants stay on the sidewalk. And a little girl walking out of a store with her sister pays the price.
This is a window into what happens when a city’s leaders care more about soft-on-crime politics than about the people getting hurt. Eddimar Paola Hernandez Chacon was seven years old. Her name deserves to be said, and Chicago deserves a mayor willing to say it.
Source: townhall.com