Steinle killing suspect’s attorney suggests shooting was accident

For the first time in more than a year, the attorney for the man accused of fatally shooting Kate Steinle has hinted at his likely trial strategy: It was all a terrible accident, and the oftdeported Mexican immigrant who held the gun when it went off was more a homeless victim of lifelong poverty than a murderous monster.

In an opinion piece published in The Chronicle this week, attorney Matt Gonzalez of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office said congressional legislation prompted by Steinle’s death, and the national attention it is attracting, is making it harder for his client, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, to receive a fair trial.

“The facts of this case are largely unknown to the public,” Gonzalez wrote.

Prosecutors say the facts are clear enough: Lopez-Sanchez, 54, killed Steinle on July 1, 2015, as she walked along Pier 14 in San Francisco with her father — and he was aiming a stolen gun at her when he fired.

A single shot hit Steinle, 32, in the back and went through her heart. Forensics analysts determined the bullet ricocheted off the ground before it struck her.

Lopez-Sanchez is a Mexican citizen who was bound for his sixth deportation for felony re-entry into the United States

when he was brought to San Francisco in March 2015 on a 20-year-old warrant for marijuana charges. The charges were dropped, and he was released from jail under San Francisco’s sanctuary city policies despite a federal request to hold him for deportation.

Steinle’s death spurred a nationwide debate over sanctuary city policies, and Donald Trump — then a candidate on his way to winning the presidency — used it as an argument for building a wall on the Mexican border. The killing also inspired Kate’s Law, a bill that proposes stiffening prison time for people who repeatedly enter the United States illegally. The House approved the bill June 29 and sent it to the Senate.

All that has happened before Lopez-Sanchez has come to trial. He pleaded not guilty in 2015 to one count of second-degree murder and is set to return to court Friday for a hearing at which a trial date could be scheduled.

Police investigators are expected to testify that Lopez-Sanchez told them he had found the gun that fired the fatal bullet under a bench and that he had shot at “a seal or a black fish.” They have said Lopez-Sanchez then threw the gun in the bay and fled.

Gonzalez’s defense is that the shooting was accidental, at least partially caused by the nature of the pistol, which had been stolen four days earlier from a federal Bureau of Land Management agent’s car.

In this week’s opinion piece, Gonzalez wrote that “the Sig Sauer .40-caliber automatic pistol, known for having a hair trigger, is documented in hundreds of accidental discharges.”

The manual for the pistol — a Sig Sauer P239 model, built for .40-caliber ammunition — warns that “if dropped, the pistol may fire,” and it gives handling instructions to prevent accidental discharge through misuse. It also includes a warning from the Massachusetts attorney general that hundreds of people die from accidental discharges of firearms, although that warning does not specifically refer to the P239.

Three firearms experts contacted by The Chronicle said Sig Sauer .40caliber pistols — which come only in semiautomatic form, not automatic — are difficult to fire accidentally. Most said that if the one that killed Steinle went off unintentionally it was probably through negligent use, not mechanical failure.

The pistol has what’s known as a double-action trigger pull, requiring 10 pounds of pressure for the first round, they said. It’s the second shot that could resemble a hair trigger, experts said, since after the first round is fired, it takes only 4.4 pounds of pressure to pull the trigger for subsequent shots.

However, court evidence in the Steinle case indicated that only one shot was fired.

“If you had your finger on the trigger, sure, it could go off. But accidentally? Give me a break,” said Scott Jackson, owner of Bay Area Firearms Training in Burlingame. “The first pull on that gun is a long, long, long pull . ... It’s as obvious as sunlight that it can’t go off accidentally.”

There is one possible wrinkle to the fail-safe nature of the pistol which the defense presented in a 2015 preliminary hearing.

If the gun was left cocked and ready to fire — something no responsible gun user would do — it would be in the secondround position, forensics expert Jim Norris told the court. And if that were the case, jostling could set it off.

“If stowed correctly, no, it won’t go off accidentally,” Norris, a retired director of the San Francisco Police Department forensics division, said in an interview. “But let’s say the Sig was cocked and ready to go . ... You’d be amazed at how easy that is to go off.”

In response to requests for comment, Gonzalez’s office sent The Chronicle an email with links to hundreds of reports and articles about unintentional discharges of firearms, many of which were varying types of mishaps involving Sig Sauer pistols. “We intend to prove at trial” that Sig Sauer firearms have accidentally discharged hundreds of times, the email said.

In his opinion piece, the lawyer noted that LopezSanchez contended in an interview with KGO-TV shortly after his arrest that he had found the gun in a T-shirt and that it “discharged while he handled it.”

In that 40-plus-minute interview, Lopez-Sanchez frequently contradicted himself in both Spanish and broken English. At one point, he appeared to say he didn’t remember what had happened, and at another he said had picked up the gun and heard “boom boom, three times.”

In his opinion piece, Gonzalez suggested that Lopez-Sanchez was no schemer. “He is a simple man with a second-grade education who has survived many hardships,” Gonzalez wrote. “He came to the U.S. repeatedly because extreme poverty is the norm in many parts of Mexico. He risked going to jail so that he could perform a menial job that could feed him.”

Sources close to both the defense and prosecution — speaking on background because they were not authorized to go on the record — said LopezSanchez appears to have mental difficulties and may have challenges representing his version of what happened.