Kathryn Steinle’s Fellow Victims

The forgotten murdered police and teenagers of America.

Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, also known as José Inez García Zarate, is a felon who has been deported five times. Lopez-Sanchez is charged in the shooting death of Kathryn Steinle, 32, by all indications a distinguished and compassionate woman. As it happens, victims of foreign nationals in the United States illegally are not limited to innocent civilians. They include police officers such as Danny Oliver

Last October, Luis Enriquez Monroy Bracamontes, a Mexican national in the United States illegally, gunned down Oliver, 47, a Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputy. Bracamontes shot Oliver in the head with a 9mm handgun but the killer and his wife Janelle Marquez Monroy also packed an AR-15 rifle. After killing Danny Oliver, Bracamontes and Monroy shot Anthony Holmes, a motorist who refused to give up his car. Holmes survived the shooting but later Bracamontes killed police detective Michael Davis with the AR-15 and wounded Jeff Davis, a deputy. Bracamontes also fired at Placer County deputies Charles Bardo and Joseph Roseli before being captured and arrested.

At the time Bracamontes was going by the alias “Marquez,” and it emerged that he had used at least five aliases and two Facebook names. He had been arrested multiple times in Arizona on drug and weapons charges. As the Sacramento Bee put it, “He was deported to Mexico twice, but managed to return to the United States illegally.” Reports also said Bracamontes had “repeatedly” entered the country illegally.

“I killed them cops,” Bracamontes told a judge in February before demanding an execution date. In March he joked he couldn’t make the next hearing because, as he said, “I’m busy.” 

Rep. Ami Bera, a northern California Democrat, invited the slain officer’s wife Susan Oliver, an African American, to president Obama’s State of the Union Speech. Her message was “build unity between citizens and law enforcement” but the president ignored the case, despite Bracamonte’s use of a military-style weapon. The Mexican national still faces counts of first-degree murder with five special circumstance allegations, including killing law enforcement officers, committing multiple murders, murder to avoid arrest, and murder during a carjacking or attempted carjacking.

After the killings, Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones posted a video urging federal officials to seal the border and noting that the person who killed Danny Oliver “is in this country illegally from Mexico. He has a significant criminal history and on at least four prior occasions he was removed from this country, each time having no consequences for his actions.” President Obama subsequently adopted a policy that would let thousands of illegals seek legal status, without taking steps to seal the border that Luis Enriquez Monroy Bracamontes “repeatedly” breached with no difficulty and no consequences.

Mexican nationals Saul Isidro-Aucencio and Francisco Delgado also breached the border with no difficulty. In February 2011 the pair shot and killed Americans Robert Corpos, 20, Richard Ward, 16, and, Jamir Miller, 15, an African American. The illegals shot Miller in the head from behind with an AK-47. They shot Corpos, father of an 18-month-old boy, in the back as he sought cover behind a tree. 

Local media did not identify the killers as illegals but Melissa Jellison, Jamir Miller’s mother, discovered their status and at the sentencing she expressed anger that her son’s killers were in the country illegally. The grieving mother got no sympathy from Superior Court judge Helene Gweon, a Schwarzenegger appointee who earned her JD at Harvard Law School and her BA at UC Berkeley.

“This case,” said Gweon, “has nothing to do with illegal aliens.” The judge’s pronouncement had local law enforcement officials shaking their heads.

Meanwhile, a New York Times report on the Steinle shooting noted that Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez had been deported five times, “raising questions about why he was in the United States.” Like Bracamontes, Delgado and Isidro-Aucencio, he repeated entered illegally. 

Lopez-Sanchez had been serving 46 months in a southern California federal prison and there was some mystery why he was returned to San Francisco to face a 20-year-old marijuana charge. As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “the Sheriff’s Department asked federal officials to do so,” in a letter the Chronicle obtained. The office of San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi duly released Lopez-Sanchez on April 15. On July 1, police arrested Lopez-Sanchez in the shooting death of Kathryn Steinle.

Mirkarimi, a former Green Party member turned Democrat, faced domestic abuse charges in 2011 and pleaded guilty to one charge of false imprisonment. As the San Jose Mercury News reports, because of his conviction Mirkarimi “became the first San Francisco sheriff to be barred from carrying a firearm.” The disarmed sheriff may be trying to compensate through his uniform, which bears four stars on each epaulet and resembles something a Soviet general might have worn.