A nine-year-old girl was shot dead moments after handing ice cream to her father in Chicago, and her killer has now been sentenced to 40 years in prison without parole.
Sarabi Medina, 9, had been preparing to begin fourth grade at Reinberg Elementary School when she was attacked in August 2023. On 5 August 2023, she was scooting through the Portage Park neighbourhood when Michael Goodman, 46, approached her with a firearm.
"Here, Daddy, I got you an ice cream," she told her father, Michael Medina, just seconds before she was shot in the head outside their flat.
The attack and arrest
Prosecutors said Michael Medina tried to intervene, but Goodman ignored him and chased Sarabi towards her apartment block, where he fatally shot her in the head. During the struggle that followed, the weapon discharged a second time, hitting Goodman in his left eye and leaving him permanently blind on that side.
Goodman was arrested and charged with her murder. On Thursday, he was sentenced to 40 years behind bars with no chance of parole after pleading guilty.
Court statements and family reaction
Goodman admitted he had taken multiple doses of ketamine obtained via the dark web on the day of the killing. He told the court he had been battling mental health problems and that his antidepressants had failed to work.
In a statement read out by his solicitor, Goodman claimed he had no memory of shooting Sarabi. "It was not the largest dose I had ever taken before, so I saw no reason that my experience would be any different than usual," he said. "The last part of the vague memory I have is walking through my front door."
"I would trade my life for hers in a heartbeat," the statement continued. Sarabi's father disputed this account, saying his daughter had been deliberately targeted. "He talks. I was there that day. We were screaming at that man. That man wouldn't look at us for nothing. He was focusing on killing my daughter," Michael told ABC affiliate WLS after the sentencing.
Sentencing and impact
Goodman was handed a 40-year prison sentence, with credit for the roughly three years he has already spent behind bars. Sarabi's friends and family have described her as the centre of her father's universe.
"She was his world," said family friend Rene Aquino following the shooting. "You killed an innocent child, an innocent baby girl for what reason?"
Medina's cousin, Juleesa Medina, said the family has no forgiveness for Goodman. "The first time I looked in his eyes I couldn't help but think that was the last thing my cousin ever saw," she said.
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