After transgender migrant was shot in Little Village, a cartel-tied Venezuelan was arrested but soon released

Early one mild morning last month, a transgender woman who recently migrated from Venezuela was waiting for a ride outside a Little Village nightclub when a driver pulled up and made an ominous remark in Spanish.

“Bad gay,” he allegedly said before firing three shots at the woman around 4:30 a.m. on Feb. 4. She was struck in the groin and both legs and left in critical condition, according to Chicago police records.

She later told investigators that she and her friends had been partying at VLive, 2501 S. Kedzie Ave., a club she described as a meeting ground for new arrivals from Venezuela. A witness also recounted the attack to police, records show.

Detectives began investigating the shooting as a hate crime and eventually homed in on a suspect — a 29-year-old Venezuelan man who was linked to a drug cartel by federal authorities.

With the help of a U.S. Marshals fugitive task force, officers took him into custody on Feb. 26 as he left a courthouse in west suburban Maywood.

He had been arrested two days earlier in Austin and hit with a list of charges, including felonies for illegally possessing a gun and ammunition, court records show. After a judge ordered him released that day, police records show he was quickly arrested again and brought in for questioning.

While he had been identified as the gunman and police had recovered key evidence — including a shell casing and video of the Ford Explorer used in the attack — Cook County prosecutors wouldn’t bring charges.

A spokesperson for the state’s attorney’s office said the case has been “continued for additional investigation,” noting that “no charging decision has been made at this time.”

In a report, police acknowledged the investigation had faced a serious setback: “Our one witness who can positively identify the gunman will not cooperate any further.”

A law enforcement source said the victim stopped cooperating because she believes she was targeted for being a sex worker and has fears about the suspect’s association with El Tren De Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang known in South America for human trafficking and drug sales.

Baltazar Enriquez, an organizer in Little Village, said community members have been left with lingering questions after similar cases have seemingly fallen apart. “Do we blame the police department or do we blame the state’s attorney?” Enriquez asked.

He noted that he and families impacted by violence recently met with officials from the state’s attorney’s office to raise concerns about homicide cases where a suspect was identified but not charged.

“That has been a problem in our community because the members feel revictimized,” he said. “Because now, they don’t have a family member and the aggressor is out on the streets.”

He pointed to what he views as a two-tiered system of justice, saying that residents in areas like Little Village “have to do protests and push for answers because [police officials] do not work with us.”

“When it’s a gangbanger, a migrant, a trans woman or a woman, they do not investigate these cases adequately,” he claimed.

Feds release wrong information about arrest

On March 3, the suspect in the shooting outside VLive was arrested yet again when police stopped him near a migrant shelter in the Loop, court records show. He was cited for driving without a license and blowing a stop sign, but the case was dropped the following day.

That same day, the U.S. Marshals Service issued a news release that offered an erroneous account of his arrest in the shooting.

The release named the suspect, provided incorrect details about his arrest and wrongly stated that he had been charged. It also used language uncommon for a news release from a federal agency, describing the suspect as “an illegal migrant from Venezuela and an alleged cartel member.”

After the Sun-Times raised questions about the release, a spokesperson issued a separate statement on March 11 saying it had “been retracted and the information was removed from our website.”

“It should not be used for reference or reporting,” spokesperson Brady McCarron added.

However, multiple news stories referencing the release remain online, including those published by Fox News and other right-wing outlets critical of the country’s current immigration policies.

Contributing: Rosemary Sobol