YOU’RE RIGHT: NADA

Lauren Smiley
2 min readJul 16, 2015

The cops never assigned an investigator to the gun theft case, and it turns out federal agencies lose track of hundreds of weapons each year. But whether the thief was Lopez-Sanchez, or whether he somehow got his hands on it later, is still a mystery.

According to prosecutors, he did get it, however, and allegedly used it to shoot Kate Steinle as she was walking with her dad on Pier 14. The cops caught Lopez-Sanchez a couple blocks away, and threw him in the same jail he’d been released from just a few months before.

When a TV reporter interviewed him, Lopez-Sanchez rambled disjointedly for 45 minutes. The reporter asked him whether he shot Steinle. He said, “Yes.”

The reporter also asked this question: “San Francisco is a sanctuary city. Did you keep coming back here because you know they couldn’t actively look for you to deport you?”

All of America’s pundits sat in wait.

What did Lopez-Sanchez answer?

Unlisted

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Lauren Smiley

San Francisco journalist studying humans in the Tech Age. For WIRED, California Sunday, and San Francisco Magazine. Alum of Matter and Backchannel.