Steinle family’s gun lawsuit against U.S. is turned down
Kate Steinle might be alive today if a U.S. park ranger hadn't left his unlocked gun in a car parked on a San Francisco street in 2015, the gun that fired the fatal shot 3½ days later. But too much happened between those two events to hold the government legally responsible, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The passage of time and intervening events — including the theft of the gun by an unknown burglar who smashed the car's window — make the ranger's actions “too tenuously connected to Ms. Steinle's death” to be a legally recognized cause of harm, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said. The 3-0 ruling upheld a federal magistrate's dismissal of a lawsuit against the federal government by Steinle's parents.
Steinle, 32, was fatally wounded by a bullet that bounced off the pavement and struck her in the back as she was walking on Pier 14 with her father in July 2015.
The gun belonged to John Woychowski, a ranger with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in El Centro (Imperial County), who had left it loaded and unlocked in a backpack under the seat of a sport utility vehicle he had parked on the Embarcadero while traveling with his family.
The weapon wound up in the hands of Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant. He denied intentionally shooting it and said he had found it wrapped in a towel and immediately dropped it as it went off.
A San Francisco jury acquitted Garcia Zarate of murder and assault charges and convicted him only of being a felon in possession of a gun. A state appeals court overturned that conviction and said the jury should have been allowed to decide whether he had only “momentary possession” of the weapon, which would not have been a crime.
Local prosecutors then dropped that charge. But Garcia Zarate, who had been behind bars since the shooting, remains in custody facing federal charges of being a felon and an undocumented immigrant in possession of a gun and ammunition. Two weeks ago, a federal judge ordered a psychiatric examination on whether he is competent to stand trial.
Garcia Zarate had been deported five times to his native Mexico and had just spent 46 months in federal prison for illegal reentry when federal officials turned him over to San Francisco officials in March 2015 to face an old marijuana charge. City prosecutors dropped that charge, and then-Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, citing San Francisco's sanctuary policy, released Garcia Zarate without notifying immigration agents, who had requested detention until they could pick him up.
Steinle's parents, Jim Steinle and Elizabeth Sullivan, sued both the city and the federal government for damages. Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero dismissed their claims against San Francisco in 2017, saying there had been no evidence that Garcia Zarate was dangerous and federal law did not require the city to inform the government of his release. He dismissed the parents' case against the federal government in January 2020.
Upholding last year's ruling, the appeals court said Tuesday that after the ranger left the gun on the car seat, an unknown burglar broke in, stole a “seemingly innocuous backpack,” found a gun inside, then wrapped it in a cloth and left it a half-mile
away, where Garcia Zarate picked it up and “fired it, apparently aimlessly,” sending a bullet that ricocheted off
the ground before striking its victim.
Steinle's death “has only a tenuous connection to Woychowski's storage of the pistol,” Judge Susan Graber said.
Frank Pitre, a lawyer for the parents, said they were disappointed by the ruling and were considering their options.