Chicago’s Morning Answer hosts Amy Jacobson and Jim Iuorio, filling in for Dan Proft, spoke with Joe Abraham, whose daughter Katie was killed along with her friend Chloe when a driver later identified as being in the country illegally struck their vehicle at high speed while intoxicated. The conversation followed public remarks from Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias denying that his office issued a driver’s license to the man responsible for the crash, a claim Abraham directly disputes.
Abraham explained that the driver was initially known to Illinois authorities as Juan Suarez, the identity tied to the license number listed on the police report, before U.S. Marshals apprehended him in Texas attempting to flee toward Mexico and determined his true identity was Julio Cuxum Bol, a Guatemalan national who does not speak English or Spanish but rather an indigenous Guatemalan language. Abraham said the driver now faces federal charges related to false identification, and argued that Giannoulias’s denial rests on a technicality, since the state did in fact issue a license to the alias the driver was using without verifying his actual identity. Abraham said he and his family are pursuing legal action and public records requests in an effort to obtain clarity from the state on exactly what occurred.
Abraham also addressed comments from Giannoulias criticizing Republican lawmakers, including Congressman Jim Jordan and State Representative Jeanne Ives, for their public statements on the issue. Abraham said those lawmakers have shown consistent support to his family, in contrast to what he described as silence from Illinois’s Democratic governor and secretary of state since Katie’s death.
Much of the conversation focused on a recent congressional hearing on sanctuary city policy, during which Abraham said he witnessed a tense exchange involving Jessica Gorman, another mother whose daughter was killed by an individual in the country illegally. Abraham said Gorman confronted lawmakers over what she saw as selective compassion toward victims of other high-profile incidents while grieving families like his own struggled to get acknowledgment from elected officials. He said the exchange included a Democratic committee member characterizing the hearing as a repetitive use of committee time, a comment Abraham said crystallized what he views as a pattern of political indifference toward victims of policies tied to sanctuary status.
Abraham also described a separate exchange with an Illinois state senator in which he said the tone of a otherwise calm conversation shifted abruptly when he asked whether any ballots had been linked to the names of individuals in the country illegally, a question he said was met with demands that he prove his concerns rather than a direct answer.
Asked whether he and his family might eventually leave Illinois, Abraham said the family, lifelong Illinois residents, has decided not to bury Katie in the state, citing what he described as the state’s failure to meaningfully respond to her death. He said the family plans to eventually relocate to another state where he can ultimately be buried alongside his daughter, describing the loss as compounded by the violent nature of the crash, which he said prevented the family from having an open casket funeral. Abraham closed by expressing hope that Illinois policy will change, while acknowledging he no longer expects that shift to come from the state’s current leadership.