This past Monday, the illegal immigrant who was acquitted for the 2015 killing of Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old resident of California, was officially sentenced to a stint of seven years in jail that he had already served.
Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate, the illegal immigrant in question, was found guilty on the count of illegal possession of a firearm. Such a charge has a maximum sentence of 10 years and three years of supervised release. He is slated to be sent to Texas for another hearing with a federal judge in the Texas Western District Court in order to deal with another case about his current illegal status.
It was reported by AP News that, as part of the issuing of the verdict on Monday, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria also issued a warning to Garcia-Zarate against attempting to return to the U.S. Before the killing happened in 2015, Garcia-Zarate was deported a total of five times and then on a federal supervised release from a conviction in Texas back in 2011 regarding his illegal border crossing back in 2009.
“If you return to this country again and you are back in front of me, I will not spare you,” stated Chhabria. “Let this be your last warning: do not return to this country.”
Garcia-Zarate found himself in California in 2015 once Texas authorities transferred him to the state in order to face a marijuana charge. The charge against Garcia-Zarate was dropped by prosecutors and the office of former San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi let him out early as part of the city’s sanctuary policy as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Directly after, Garcia-Zarate found the gun that would end up killing Steinle: a semi-automatic pistol wrapped in cloth stashed underneath a bench on the pier. When Garcia-Zarate shot the gun, the round ricocheted off of the ground and slammed in the back of Steinle. She ended up dying from the gunshot wound just two hours later. Garcia-Zarate made the claim while in court that he did not know he was actually holding a gun and that the shot was fired entirely unintentionally.
Kristina Wong, a reporter for Breitbart, posted that she knew one of the nurses who had worked on Steinle. As stated by WOng, that ordeal was more than enough to change the still unidentified nurse’s entire perspective concerning illegal immigrants.
I know one of the nurses who worked to save Steinle that day, and it red-pilled the sh*t out of her against illegal immigrants. https://t.co/ECydkrlZMp
— Kristina Wong 🇺🇸 (@kristina_wong) June 6, 2022
A report from the AP News stated that Mike Hinckley, the lawyer for Garcia-Zarate, claimed during the verdict on Monday that Garcia-Zarate “feels horrible” about the death of Steinle and is still “very sorry.” Chhabria did speculate that Garcia-Zarate must have gone through “hell,” referencing a disclosure that stated that doctors diagnosed Garcia-Zarate with schizophrenia, which invalidated his ability to stand trial.
As stated in a press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ) that went out in mid-March, Garcia-Zarate pled guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm and of being an illegal immigrant. Garcia-Zarate was acquitted by a jury of murder and involuntary manslaughter back in 2017 but found him guilty of felony possession of a firearm.
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