CHICAGO, Illinois — Michael Goodman, 46, was sentenced on Thursday morning, November 5, to 40 years in prison for the first-degree murder of a nine-year-old girl who was shot outside her home in Chicago's Portage Park neighbourhood in August 2023, after he pleaded guilty under a plea agreement. Cook County Circuit Judge Tyria Walton imposed the sentence, WGN-TV reported.
Source: WGN-TV Chicago
Under the terms reported from the family's account of the hearing, the 40-year sentence must be served in full — 100 per cent — with no possibility of parole. Goodman had been charged with first-degree murder after the 2023 shooting and had faced a possible trial before he admitted the killing in the plea deal, ABC7 Chicago reported.
Source: ABC7 Chicago
The night of the shooting
The shooting happened on a Saturday night in August 2023 in Portage Park, a residential neighbourhood on Chicago's Northwest Side. According to prosecutors' account as reported locally, the girl had been out with her father and had just bought ice cream from an ice cream truck. Her father was talking with friends inside a parked vehicle while she stood nearby with her scooter, moments before a gunshot was heard.
Prosecutors alleged that Goodman walked out of his apartment building carrying a handgun, approached the group and shot the girl in the head on the sidewalk outside her home. Witnesses told investigators that Goodman had complained shortly before the shooting that the girl was being too loud — reporting by the Associated Press at the time said neighbours described a man upset over noise.
Source: Associated Press, 2023 charging coverage
After the shooting, the girl's father tackled Goodman, and Goodman himself was shot during the struggle that followed, according to the police report cited by the AP in 2023. Goodman was taken into custody and charged with first-degree murder; the girl did not survive her injuries.
A family struck by gun violence twice
Local reporting on the family's history says the girl's mother was shot and killed in 2018, and that the family moved into the Portage Park apartment after her death. Five years later, the same family lost the nine-year-old outside that home — a history that relatives and neighbours returned to repeatedly as the case moved through Cook County court, and again at Thursday's sentencing.
A child was killed on the sidewalk outside her own home, in the early evening, in a case where prosecutors alleged the motive raised by witnesses was a complaint about noise. The killing became one of Chicago's most closely followed neighbourhood shootings, and the plea brought the criminal case to an end without a trial.
What the sentence means
A 40-year term that must be served in full means Goodman, now 46, would not be released until his mid-eighties even before any other legal consequences are considered. The plea agreement spared the family a trial and the possibility of the evidence — including the moments on that sidewalk in August 2023 — being relitigated in open court. With sentencing complete, the criminal proceedings against Goodman are concluded, and he will serve his term in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections.
What happens next
Nothing further is scheduled in the criminal case: the plea and Thursday's sentence close it. What remains open is the wider argument the case fed in Chicago — about gun violence in residential neighbourhoods, and about how a dispute over noise on a summer evening could end with a child dead. For Portage Park, and for Punjabi and other immigrant families across Illinois who followed the case, the sentence ends the court story. It does not end the family's loss, which relatives made clear outside the courtroom: the sentence is measured in years, and it will be served in full.