San Francisco shooting: man deported five times calls crime accidental
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Version 0 of 1. A man arrested in the seemingly random fatal shooting of a woman at a San Francisco pier has admitted in a jailhouse interview that he shot her, but said it was an accident. Francisco Sanchez, 45, was arrested over the death of Kathryn Steinle, 32, who was killed while out for an evening stroll at Pier 14 with her father and a family friend last Wednesday. Police said witnesses heard no argument or dispute, suggesting it was a random attack. Witnesses took pictures of Sanchez immediately after the shooting, and the images helped police arrest him while he was walking on a sidewalk a few blocks away. The shooting drew national attention and criticism of the city’s sanctuary ordinance after federal officials revealed that Sanchez had seven felony convictions and had been deported five times to his native Mexico. Related: Divided Mexico unites against Trump: 'He has no respect for human beings' The Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump seized on the case to further his controversial criticism of Mexico and immigrants to the US, saying on Friday it was “yet another example of why we must secure our border immediately”. “This is an absolutely disgraceful situation and I am the only one that can fix it. Nobody else has the guts to even talk about it,” the billionaire developer and reality TV personality said. On Sunday, Sanchez told KGO-TV in a mix of Spanish and English that he found a gun wrapped inside a shirt while he was sitting on a bench at the pier, smoking a cigarette. “So I picked it up and … it started to fire on its own,” Sanchez said, adding that he heard three shots. He appeared confused and sometimes spoke incoherently, and said he had poor vision and was under the influence of sleeping pills at the time of the shooting. “All I want to say is that in the courts, I want them to give me the punishment I deserve and get it over with as soon as possible,” Sanchez said during the roughly 45-minute interview. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had turned Sanchez over to authorities in San Francisco on 26 March, on an outstanding drug warrant. The sheriff’s department released Sanchez on 15 April, after the San Francisco district attorney’s office declined to prosecute him for what authorities said was a decade-old marijuana possession case. An ICE spokeswoman, Virginia Kice, said the agency had issued a detainer for Sanchez, requesting notification of his release and that he would stay in custody until immigration authorities could pick him up. The detainer was not honoured, she said. Freya Horne, counsel for the San Francisco sheriff’s department, said on Friday that federal detention requests were not sufficient to hold someone. Under the city’s sanctuary ordinance, people in the country illegally are not handed over to immigration officials unless there is a warrant for their arrest. Sanchez said he returned to the US after being deported because he found better-paying jobs in the country than in Mexico. |