The homeless Mexican immigrant who was pilloried by then-candidate Donald Trump after he was accused of fatally shooting a woman on a San Francisco pier was found not guilty of murder on Thursday.
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was acquitted in a case that galvanized anti-immigration forces and forced San Francisco officials to defend their “sanctuary city” policy.
Kathryn Steinle, 33, died in her father’s arms when she was shot on July 1, 2015, while they and a family friend were strolling along Pier 14 in the city’s tourist-friendly Embarcadero district.
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In her closing argument, Deputy District Attorney Diana Garcia said the suspect found the gun somewhere and deliberately fired at Steinle in “his own secret version of Russian roulette.”
The bullet that felled Steinle ricocheted off the pier’s concrete walkway before it struck her.
Garcia Zarate was found guilty of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Defense attorney Matt Gonzalez told jurors the shooting was a tragic accident and that prosecutors were pushing a “wild narrative of a desire to hurt someone he does not know.”
Gonzalez said Garcia Zarate found the semi-automatic handgun wrapped in a shirt under a chair on the pier — and it went off by accident when he picked it up.
The weapon, as it turned out, had been stolen from a federal Bureau of Land Management ranger a week before.
The six-man, six-woman jury was asked to consider first-degree murder, second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter charges against Garcia Zarate.
Trump seized on the Garcia Zarate case during the campaign as proof that the U.S. needs his proposed border wall.
After he was elected president, Trump signed an executive order to cut funding from cities that limit cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities, a policy that a federal judge in San Francisco permanently blocked Monday.
Garcia Zarate, who also used the name Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, had been deported five times before the deadly encounter. He had finished a federal prison sentence for illegal re-entry into the United States and was transferred in March 2015 to San Francisco’s jail to face a 20-year-old charge for selling marijuana.
But three months before the deadly encounter on the pier, Garcia Zarate was released after the district attorney dropped the marijuana charge — despite a request by federal immigration authorities to detain him for yet another deportation.