On July 1, Kate Steinle was killed by an immigrant who had been deported multiple times, and now her family is suing.
Steinle’s family sued the San Francisco sheriff’s office and federal authorities on Tuesday. Their case is built on an alleged series of errors that ended up having fatal consequences.
Steinle, 32, died when she was hit with a single bullet on a San Francisco pier. The incident took place while she was walking with her father and a friend down the pier when the man, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, allegedly pulled the trigger and shot her, according to the Huffington Post.
Lopez-Sanchez has so far pleaded not guilty to the charge. But the case is full of confusion, as he also said in a television interview that he found the gun under a bench and when he picked it up, it accidently fired.
The case against Lopez-Sanchez is in the hands of a judge who will have to determine whether or not there is enough evidence for a trial. In the meantime, Steinle’s parents, James Steinle and Elizabeth Sullivan, have filed lawsuits against San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials as well as the Bureau of Land Management, all for a multitude of errors.
The shooting sparked a national debate around immigration because originally the federal authorities sent Lopez-Sanchez to San Francisco back in March over a 20-year-old marijuana charge. When the San Francisco district attorney let him off, he was then released in April in accordance with a law that prohibits the detention of immigrants without a warrant.
Sheriff Mirkarimi and ICE both blamed each other for his release. ICE said the sheriff’s office should have issued a warning when Lopez-Sanchez was released and the sheriff is saying that ICE did not fill out and process their paperwork right.
“We have two different government bureaucracies pointing the finger at each other for failing to notify the other,” said attorney Frank Pitre, who is representing the family. “We’re not talking about the release of an innocent, undocumented alien, we’re talking about a seven-time felon.”
Lopez-Sanchez’s history includes a record of five times of being deported back to Mexico from 1994-2009 as well as multiple prior convictions for heroin possession beginning in 1993.
While the lawsuits filed by the family do not challenge San Francisco’s “sanctuary city” law, they do claim that the sheriff violated federal law when he issued a memo in March that prohibited his staff from contacting ICE. The lawsuit towards ICE outlines how their paperwork was a mess and they did not seek out a warrant or judicial order in order to detain Lopze-Sanchez.
“The Bureau of Land Management takes seriously the loss of any human life and we are continuing to fully cooperate with the ongoing investigations,” spokeswoman Martha Maciel said in a statement.
