A federal indictment filed Wednesday alleged for the first time that a gun found on a man in a Little Village restaurant parking lot in November was the same weapon used to fire shots toward immigration agents as they ran enforcement raids earlier that day.
Hector Gómez, 45, was charged in the indictment with possession of a weapon by a felon as well as gun possession by a previously deported alien. An arraignment date was not immediately set.
While the indictment does not allege Gómez actually fired the shots at agents, the charges for the first time connect the 9mm weapon allegedly found on Gomez to shell casings at the scene.
Gómez’s initial arrest took place toward the end of a chaotic morning of immigration raids in Little Village on Nov. 8, in which a Chicago police officer was hit by a car and a baby girl and her family were pepper-sprayed while trying to get groceries.
During the Border Patrol raids, incensed residents pursued carloads of federal agents as they wound their way through the neighborhood, arresting people and deploying chemical crowd controls.
At one point, agents called Chicago police to report that someone had fired shots from a black Jeep Wrangler at one of their vehicles near 25th and Kedzie, though no one was hit, according to police.
According to police reports, officers who arrived at that intersection in response to the call didn’t get to question the Border Patrol agents further “due to a large hostile crowd that was beginning to escalate and throw bricks.”
The Ogden (10th) District commander personally located two 9 mm shell casings in the 2500 block of South Kedzie Avenue, the reports stated.
Around 2:15 p.m. that day, police arrived at Aguascalientes for a 911 call of a person with a gun. People in the restaurant’s parking lot, in the 3100 block of West 26th Street, pointed them toward a black 2018 Jeep Wrangler. A man was sitting in the car with a gun in his lap, authorities said.
The man, later identified as Gómez, had allegedly approached a woman with the gun in his hand, laughing and pointing it at her, authorities said. The arrest report states that the Jeep matched the description federal agents had given a few hours earlier but doesn’t draw any other connection between Gómez and agents’ report of shots fired.
The federal charges allege Gómez is an immigrant from Mexico without legal status with a criminal history that includes two weapons convictions, most recently in 2025.
Gómez first entered the U.S. in 2008 using a fake name and has since been removed from the country several times, according to the federal charges.
Gómez’s attorney could not immediately be reached Wednesday.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
