Time on this one...

Pier killing suspect, in jailhouse interview, admits firing gun

By Evan Sernoffsky

The suspect arrested last week in the death of Kathryn Steinle on Pier 14 admitted to the killing and said he found a gun moments before he fired the shot that hit the 32-year-old woman.

Francisco Sanchez, 45, spoke in broken English to KGO-TV reporter Cornell Barnard during a Sunday afternoon jailhouse interview, in which Sanchez cryptically touched on the events leading to Wednesday’s slaying.

“Did you shoot Kate Steinle, the lady that was down on Pier 14?” Barnard asked Sanchez.

“Yes,” he replied.

Through a series of tangled words, Sanchez appeared to say that he found the gun wrapped in a shirt on a bench after he had taken sleeping pills that he found in a trash bin.

“I hear the boom, boom three times,” he told KGO TV.

A source familiar with the investigation said last week that Sanchez admitted to killing Steinle, but said he was at the pier to shoot at sea lions. When he realized around 6:30 p.m. that he had shot the Pleasanton native, Sanchez threw the gun into the bay and ran off, the source said.

The suspect was captured along the Embarcadero shortly after the killing. Steinle died a few hours later at San Francisco General Hospital.

Sanchez may be formally charged Monday when the case is turned over to the San Francisco district attorney’s office. He is being held on suspicion of murder in county lockup.

The case has drawn national attention after it was revealed that Sanchez was an undocumented immigrant who had been deported five times and has a rap sheet of seven felonies.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said that San Francisco sheriff’s deputies released Sanchez from jail in April, despite asking that they be notified before his release, so they could deport him.

The Sheriff’s Department, though, said it followed its own “no-holds ICE policy,” which states that it does not honor immigration detention requests from federal officials.

The department’s policy is an expansion on a citywide ordinance, and a 2013 law passed through the state Legislature, saying only immigrants facing serious felonies can be held for federal immigration officials. Such requests are treated as voluntary, according to the law.

Sanchez has been convicted of seven felonies, four of which were drug related, and the most recent for re-entering the country after deportation. Sanchez was serving time in federal prison before immigration officials brought him to San Francisco to clear an outstanding warrant for marijuana possession.

The drug charge was tossed out on March 27, and after deputies checked to make sure there was no legal basis to hold him, Sanchez was released.

The reason he kept coming back to the United States, he told KGO, was that he was “looking for the jobs in the restaurant or roofing, landscaping or construction” businesses.

Sanchez, looking despondent during the interview, appeared to be remorseful and said he wanted to apologize for what happened.

(A lot of time is being spent talking about this killing, but little time is spent on the daily killings in Oakland. Of course those killings are mostly minorities killing each other so who cares... That is what it seems like, since this killing is a Mexican national killing a white woman. The black on black killings are hardly mentioned at all....)