Federal charges: On July 1, 2015, 32-year-old Kathryn "Kate" Steinle was shot and killed while walking with her father and a friend along Pier 14 in the Embarcadero district of San Francisco.

The man who fired the gun, José Inez García Zárate, said he had found it moments before, wrapped in cloth beneath a bench on which he was sitting, and that when he picked it up the weapon went off.

[8][9][10] On July 5, 2015, investigators returned to the pier and found a point 12–15 feet (3.7–4.6 m) from García Zárate's presumed location where a bullet had ricocheted off of the concrete.

[8] The ranger, John Woychowski, testified at trial that he had left the weapon holstered and unsecured in a backpack under the front seat of his personal vehicle while he went to dinner with his family.

[15][16] Kathryn Michelle "Kate" Steinle (December 13, 1982 – July 1, 2015) was originally from Pleasanton, California, grew up in Germany and graduated from Amador Valley High School.

[7][9] She was employed at Medtronic in San Francisco and was living on Beale Street, close to Pier 14, the site of the shooting.

[18] José Inez García Zárate (or Juan Francisco López-Sánchez),[19] of Guanajuato, Mexico, is an illegal immigrant who was deported from the U.S. a total of five times, most recently in 2009.

The jury also had the option of deciding if he was guilty of involuntary manslaughter (where the death occurs without intent but "through the negligent or reckless actions of the defendant").

[39] On subsequent days, jurors heard testimonies from eyewitnesses of the shooting, local investigators and the BLM ranger whose stolen gun was used in the crime.

[14][40][41][42][43][44] Police revealed how they had lied to García Zárate in order to motivate him to confess to the shooting by saying that they had more evidence than had actually been collected at the time.

[45] The prosecution contended he brought the stolen gun to the crime scene while the defense claimed the weapon was found under a Pier 14 seat.

A supervising criminologist at the San Francisco Police Department crime lab testified that the gun was in excellent condition and would not have fired without someone pulling the trigger.

The defense argued that this made it more plausible that García Zárate could have pulled the trigger accidentally while picking up or unwrapping the bundled gun.

[58][59] On November 30, 2017, after five days of deliberations, the jury acquitted García Zárate of all murder and manslaughter charges, but convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

[63] On August 30, 2019, the California state 1st District Court of Appeals overturned the gun conviction saying "the judge failed to instruct the jury on one of his defenses".

[64] On June 6, 2022, García Zárate was sentenced by California federal judge Vince Chhabria to the seven years he's already spent in jail, legally closing the case.

The .40-caliber handgun had been taken from a U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ranger's car that was parked in downtown San Francisco, on June 27, 2015.

He testified at trial that he had left the weapon holstered and unsecured in a backpack under the front seat of his personal vehicle while he went to dinner with his family.

[14] Woychowski immediately reported the theft to San Francisco police, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Crime Information Center.

[69] On January 7, 2017, Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero dismissed the family's claims against San Francisco and former Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi.

[70] In January 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Kate's family could not sue the city of San Francisco.

[71][72] The killing sparked fierce criticism and political debate over San Francisco's sanctuary city policy, which disallows local officials from questioning a resident's immigration status.

[73][74] White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest stated that the U.S. would be safer if Republican lawmakers had approved comprehensive immigration reform backed by President Barack Obama.

[75] 2016 U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joined California Senator and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, in condemning the policy.

On July 7, Feinstein stated that the San Francisco County Sheriff's Department should have notified ICE before García Zárate was released, so that he could be deported from the country.

[77] In a press conference held on July 10, Mirkarimi blamed federal prison and immigration officials for the series of events that led up to the release of García Zárate.

[80] The Donald Trump presidential campaign for the 2016 election released the political advertisement "Act of Love", showing García Zárate and criticizing rival Jeb Bush's policy on illegal immigration.