A Chicago family is mourning the death of a rising high school senior who was fatally shot in the parking lot of a Little Village McDonald’s by an associate of someone working at the fast-food restaurant. A young man has been charged with the killing after surveillance footage captured him picking up shells discarded from the firearm he used to take the teenager’s life.
On Friday, July 1, Anthony Heredia was been charged with first-degree murder and unlawful use of a weapon by a felon in the shooting death of Tiera Franklin, 17. He was also charged with one felony count of possession of a controlled substance.
Presiding over his case was Circuit Judge Susana Ortiz, who spoke on how easy it was for Heredia, at 19, to get a gun.
She said, “I will note here that we have a 19-year-old who can obtain firearms more readily than he can obtain a pack of cigarettes. That’s something we may want to look at.”
After hearing his testimony, she ordered that Heredia be held in Cook County Jail without bond since his hearing on Sunday, July 3, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The 19-year-old, who is currently on parole after pleading guilty to reckless discharge of a firearm, shot the Curie High School student in the back near the McDonald’s at 4334 W. 26th St in the Little Village area of West Chicago.
Little Village in South Lawndale is a community heavily populated with residents of Mexican descent, the ethnic identity of the shooter.
He told prosecutors a friend working at the restaurant called him to come over to avenge an alleged earlier altercation at the establishment a week prior involving the associate and Franklin. When he arrived, he was told that Franklin there was no problem. The girl seemed to have come to McDonald’s with her family to get food.
As the student went in with her family to order, Heredia stayed outside in the parking lot waiting for her to come out.
Around 3 p.m., Franklin approached the McDonald’s drive-thru and threw a cup of water in the face of one of the employees inside the window. The person who called Heredia and the reasons why Franklin tossed the water at the person are unknown.
At that time, a watching Heredia rolled up on her on his bicycle, pulled out his gun, and shot twice at her. One bullet hit the teen in her back, and she collapsed. Her family took her to St. Anthony Hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.
Police say this was a revenge killing prompted by an “ongoing dispute.”
According to the Daily Mail, Franklin died almost three months after her mother Keeyana Sanderson’s death, leaving her recently orphaned and in the care of DCFS. Her mom died of cancer and her father, who died when she was 5 years old, also lost his life to gun violence.
The broken-hearted family says they were just getting over one loss of a loved one and now are preparing to memorialize another.
A family friend, Krystina Ross said, ABC 7 reports, “We just lost her mother in April. We’re not even nowhere near healed from that.”
Some family members are going over all the preventative scenarios that might have spared her life, even regretting letting her go out.
Franklin’s aunt Juanita Flowers, who called the killing “tragic,” said, “I feel like if I would’ve been here, maybe an hour, 45 minutes earlier, she would’ve been in the car with me. She wouldn’t have been at the location where it happened.”
A surveillance camera allegedly captured Heredia leaving but then returning to the parking lot to pick up a shell casing from the shooting. Detectives discovered a matching shell casing in his pocket when he was arrested — on the same day of the shooting.
It is unclear if Franklin and Heredia knew each other personally. Like Franklin, he also was living without his biological parents, staying in a foster home, according to his lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Courtney Smallwood.
Like Franklin, the young man was also going into his senior year — at the Country Club Hills Tech and Trade private school in the fall.
Over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, 35 people were shot in the city of Chicago. Franklin is one of five fatalities, Tdpelmedia reports.
