Five-Time Deported Suspect in Kathryn Steinle San Francisco Pier 14 Killing Admits To Shooting

The suspect in the fatal shooting of Kathryn Steinle has admitted to the crime, but claims it was an accident.

Francisco Sanchez, the suspect in the Steinle killing, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was previously deported five times and has multiple felonies on his rap sheet in the U.S., granted a jailhouse interview to ABC7 News San Francisco while he is being held on a charge of murder.

Given that Sanchez is somewhat fluent in English, the interview was conducted partially in Spanish, and some of his responses to the questioning appear short of being fully definitive and/or somewhat contradictory.

Sanchez also claimed he ingested some sleeping pills and, as such, doesn’t remember everything that happened on Pier 14 of the San Francisco Embarcadero waterfront on the night in question.

Kathryn Steinle, 32, of Pleasanton, California, who recently moved to San Francisco, was tragically shot and killed Wednesday night as she was walking on the pier — a popular tourist destination — with her father in an apparent random incident.

Sanchez expressed sorrow for what happened, indicated that he is guilty, and wants the court to impose punishment as soon as possible.

He claimed that while sitting on a bench, he found the gun wrapped in a T-shirt, and it accidentally went off when he picked it up.

San Francisco is a so-called sanctuary city, and as a result, local authorities apparently declined to turn the man over to Homeland Security for deportation number six when he was set free from the county jail in April after being taken into custody on a drug-related charge.

In the interview with reporter Cornell Barnard, Sanchez — who has worked in Arizona, Washington, and Oregon in the construction industry and other jobs — acknowledged that he returned to San Francisco because he was aware that it was a sanctuary city, making another deportation back to Mexico unlikely.

Although various media outlets initially suggested that Sanchez is in his mid 40s, during the Q&A he says that he is age 56.

Watch the interview with Francisco Sanchez, the alleged shooter in the Kathryn Steinle killing embedded below, and draw your own conclusions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbJ_6o4c5Vk

Kathryn Steinle’s family has set up a GoFundMe account in her memory to support the charities important to her. “Kate had a special soul, a kind and giving heart, the most contagious laugh I have ever heard and smile I have ever seen. Kate loved to laugh, travel, spend time with friends, and most of all loved her family,” her brother wrote.

Separately, the Washington Examiner reports that nearly one million illegal immigrants who never showed up for a court hearing, including 170,000 criminal aliens, are still at large the U.S. despite being ordered in absentia to leave the country by an immigration judge. “Even those immigrants who are in court to receive their removal orders are not immediately removed. Instead, they are often told to report in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — but often vanish.” In addition, a new procedure implemented by the Department of Homeland Security requires that “once an undocumented alien establishes some claim to remaining in the United States, they will be released from detention centers.”

As the Inquisitr previously detailed, more than 100 illegal immigrants released from detention by the federal government while they were awaiting deportation allegedly went on to commit murder in the U.S., according to the Obama administration’s own data.

The number of illegal alien felons removed from the U.S. has also reportedly decreased by 30 percent in 2015 under what the Obama administration has referred to as prosecutorial discretion.

[image via Twitter]