SAN FRANCISCO — The bullet that killed Kate Steinle on Pier 14 last month as she walked with her father was fired accidentally, a ballistics expert testified Thursday on behalf of the man charged with her murder.
“The gun was pointed at the ground,” James Norris, the former head of the San Francisco Police crime lab, said repeatedly on the stand Thursday during the preliminary hearing of Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a Mexican national and five-time deportee who has ignited a national debate on illegal immigration and drawn the ire of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Out of court, Norris called the shooting an accident. “You couldn’t do this on purpose,” he said of intentionally ricocheting a shot and hitting a person roughly 100 feet away.
Prosecutor Diane Garcia contends that the shot was intentional. Her firearms expert, inspector John Evans, and Norris agree a divot in the mangled bullet taken from Steinle show a ricochet occurred. Evans said in court Wednesday that it was possible the gunman was aiming at Steinle.
Garcia hammered that point at Norris on Thursday, asking him if it were possible Lopez-Sanchez intended to shoot Steinle and the bullet hit the ground “because he was a lousy shot.”
Lopez-Sanchez admitted firing the gun, a police sergeant testified earlier in the week.
Thursday’s testimony wrapped up a three-day hearing, and now Judge Brendan Conroy is expected to rule in September whether Lopez-Sanchez should be held for a murder trial.
Lopez-Sanchez has five felony convictions for entering the United States illegally and was released from federal prison earlier this year and sent to San Francisco because of a 20-year-old warrant in a minor marijuana case. Federal immigration authorities were not alerted when his charges were dropped, and Lopez-Sanchez was freed to the streets under San Francisco “sanctuary city” law that limits turning over illegal aliens for deportation.
Contact Thomas Peele at (510) 208-6458 and follow him at Twitter.com/thomas_peele.