Steinle case stirs bitter memories for family
Before the Steinles, there were the Bolognas. On a cool summer day in 2008, the San Francisco family was torn apart by a senseless act that thrust the city and its immigration policies into the national spotlight.
A little more than seven years before Kate Steinle was fatally shot on Pier 14, Danielle Bologna lost her husband and two of her sons in a mistaken-identity gang hit by an MS-13 member who had been shielded from deportation twice by city juvenile justice officials relying on San Francisco’s sanctuary laws.
The cases ended differently, with the MS-13 killer sent to prison for life and
the homeless undocumented immigrant accused of shooting Steinle acquitted Nov. 30 of murder and manslaughter charges after saying he had fired accidentally.
But both families had to deal with an aftermath in which the tragedies stopped being solely their own, in which their pain became a talking point in the tempestuous debate over U.S. immigration, in which they had a loud voice but in a conversation they couldn’t control.
“I felt like my family was just nothing,” Bologna, 57, told The Chronicle in a recent interview. “No one even really cared, though they liked to blame each other for this or that. And I was just left trying to make the best for my two surviving children.”
Bologna said she can’t help but wonder now what happened to all of the groups that whispered into her ear and made her the face of the city’s alleged failures. Where are the politicians, she wonders, with their fake smiles and empty promises, who wrung her family for all they could before moving on to the next tragedy?
“I sit at times by myself and I see it all happen again,” Bologna said.
The Steinles echoed some of the same sentiments during the prosecution of Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, who before the Pier 14 shooting was released from San Francisco County Jail under the city’s sanctuary ordinance despite a federal request to hold him for his sixth deportation.
“We just want to get this over with and move on with our lives, and think about Kate on our terms. Nothing’s been on our terms. It’s been on everyone else’s terms,” said Jim Steinle, who was walking on the pier with his 32-year-old daughter when she was shot on July 1, 2015.
Bologna said she felt she had been manipulated, first by a family member and then by anti-immigration groups, into taking stances on issues she could not fully grasp after losing half of her family.
Both families took aim at city authorities and filed lawsuits over actions officials took that protected the men accused in the killings. At the same time, though, they shared nuanced views of broader sanctuary policies that are intended to breed trust between immigrants and local government agencies.
In the aftermath of traumatic events, the grief of loved ones is often exploited, according to advocates for victims. The emotions are complicated, they said, and often misunderstood even by those experiencing them in the moment.
“There’s an abuse of the process in terms of timing,” said attorney Frank Pitre, who is representing the Steinles in a lawsuit. “In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, seizing on somebody’s emotions to politicize an issue — that’s where I think people need to take a step back and think about the impact that that has on a family. Families don’t consider how they may be manipulated or misused, Pitre said.
“They want the loss of a loved one to stand for something, but they’re at a very vulnerable time,” he said. “The last thing they want is to suddenly see a loved one’s name being used as a polarizing issue amongst disparate views.”
In the age of a 24-hour news cycle, the role of victims and survivors can be magnified, said Gena Castro Rodriguez, who heads the victim services unit for the San Francisco district attorney’s office.
“A story that may have been local 15 years ago is now global in seconds,” she said. “It’s on the news all the time, or it’s on YouTube. I had clients who would be sitting on their phones, watching themselves get shot over and over and over again.”
After Garcia Zarate’s arrest, and the revelation that he was undocumented, the Steinles appeared on talk shows and spoke at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where Jim Steinle blamed “basic incompetence on many levels” for his daughter’s death. President Trump invoked the case in his campaign. Before they knew it, their daughter’s name and legacy seemed to be out of their hands, even paraded by white nationalists.
Bologna knew the cycle too well. On June 22, 2008, her husband, Tony Bologna, 48, and sons Michael, 20, and 16-year-old Matthew, were driving a few blocks from their home in the Excelsior neighborhood when their car was riddled with bullets.
Tony and Michael were killed at the scene, with Matthew dying in a hospital two days later. A third son, now 27, survived the attack and remains haunted by the memory. Danielle Bologna also has a daughter who is 20.
Edwin Ramos, who is serving three life sentences without the possibility of parole, and Wilfredo Reyes, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison, were said by police to be members of MS-13 who mistook one of more of the Bolognas for rivals. None of the Bolognas had any gang affiliations.
Ramos had entered the U.S. with documentation and had temporary protected status for most of his time in the country. But his juvenile convictions had made him deportable.
The contours of the case were unusually complex. Danielle Bologna knew she was angry, but at what she could not name. She said she was in a state of shock for many of her publicized appearances. For days after the shooting, she found herself reaching for the phone to call her husband, only to remember that she could not.
“She was dealing with this sort of profound grief and chaos and just trying to survive, and she was just completely exploited,” said her friend Marti McKee.
Looking back, she says the point she had been trying to make was specific, that Ramos should have been in custody or deported because he was a convicted criminal and because federal authorities building a racketeering case against MS-13 had information he may have killed before.
Lost in her embrace by antiimmigration advocates was that her father had entered the country from Mexico without legal papers and that her mother’s family had emigrated from Nicaragua.
“I never once said anything negative about immigration,” she said. “I knew there were good people who were here to work.”
McKee met Bologna in the midst of the storm. Local law enforcement officers who have long butted heads with the city’s progressive initiatives had enlisted Danielle and her children to march with them against sanctuary city policies, even though there were concerns her surviving son could be targeted as a witness to a gang shooting. The family later had to enter into witness protection after receiving a threat.
“These people had just lost their family, they had just been murdered by a gang, and you want to bring them on a march to the jail?” McKee said. “That law enforcement would use this woman to further their agenda, I just had a breakdown.”
Advocates said families that have suffered unexpected tragedies are vulnerable to exploitation in part because the spotlight seems to satisfy their most basic pleas: Don’t forget my loved one. Please let their deaths mean something more.
But Castro Rodriguez, the victim services chief, said a family should have more power to decide when and how its loss makes an impact.
“For some people, taking their tragedy to a bigger level can be healing, to create some sort of meaning out of their loss,” she said. “But that has to be at their pace and their direction, and when the outside world takes over that process for them, they don’t get the luxury of being able to control that.
“Think about it,” she said. “They just had no control over the loss of their loved one and now they have no control over the story and the direction that it is going.”
The Steinles hope to improve public safety with a pending lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, said Pitre, their attorney. Kate Steinle was killed by a gun that had been unsecured when it was stolen four days earlier from a ranger’s parked car in San Francisco.
For the Bolognas, next year will mark the 10th anniversary of the killings. The mother wonders what her sons’ lives would have been like. Michael would have been 30. Would he have been someone’s husband or father?
Danielle Bologna said she wanted to get in touch with the Steinle family when she heard about the Pier 14 shooting. But she stopped herself. She saw once before how her grief could be distorted, how easily an innocent gesture of support could be publicly misconstrued.