Last July’s high profile murder of Kathryn Steinle as she was walking along San Francisco’s iconic Pier 14 with a gun stolen from a federal agent has wound up in court.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management confirmed the .40-caliber Sig Sauer P-239 recovered at the scene was the duty pistol of a Ranger stolen from his vehicle, though they have declined to name the officer involved.
Steinle’s alleged killer, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, 46, a Mexican national with at least seven felonies and five deportations under his belt, pleaded not guilty in San Francisco Superior Court last year and maintains he found the gun in a T-shirt on a bench. This was just weeks after he was briefly in custody of the San Francisco sheriff’s office but released despite a request to detain him further by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement due to a memo issued by Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi to generally refuse requests from the agency.
The 26-page suit, filed last Thursday by the slain woman’s mother and father in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims general and public entity negligence in the wrongful death of Steinle, naming the BLM, ICE, the City and County of San Francisco, Mirkarimi and Steinle’s alleged murderer himself as defendants.
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