Thread: NEB - Community activist questions why alleged drunken driver wasn't under immigratio

Community activist questions why alleged drunken driver wasn't under immigration hold

6:35 PM CST Feb 16, 2016
By Chinh Doan

OMAHA, Neb. —A community activist raised pointed questions over the death of a 21-year old woman.

Eswin Mejia, 19, is a suspected drunk driver accused of killing Sarah Root in a crash at 33rd and l streets. He bonded out of jail days after his arrest and has disappeared.

In a letter to Omaha’s mayor, police chief and other community leaders like city councilman Garry Gernandt, Rebecca Barrientos-Patlan, a co-founder of the Burlington Road Neighborhood Association, worries "about the silence as to what will happen next."

The Omaha Police Department has confirmed to KETV NewsWatch 7 that Mejia was undocumented when he entered the United States. The department adds it does not want the focus of the investigation to be on Mejia’s immigration status, rather on locating the suspect.

As Root's family continues to mourn her loss, strangers are outraged. "This intersection it has a lot to do with pride for our area," Barrientos-Patlan said of the area involved in the fatal crash.

Although she did not know anyone involved in the crash, Barrientos-Patlan demands to know why Mejia was held to just $50,000 bond. Omaha Police confirmed Mejia’s brother bailed him out by posting 10%.

"Why he let him out on such a low bond when the county attorney was asking for a higher bond?" Barrientos-Patlan asked.

She also wants to know why there wasn't immigration and customs enforcement on his case even after court records show Mejia was jailed before and failed to appear for court last year.

"Why wasn't there a detainer on him?" she asked. "Why didn't they call ICE to come get him?"

"I understand the public concern about how did this system break down," City Council member Garry Gernandt said.

Gernandt is a former police officer and vows to support any kind of public discussion.

"To see if procedures need to be changed," he said. "If there's updates in what law enforcement does, what's expected of the public and what's expected of the system on the court side."

Both Gernandt and Barrientos-Patlan agree the call to action involves engagement from everyone.

"Everybody's going to have to come to the table law enforcement corrections," Barrientos-Patlan said.

KETV NewsWatch 7 has confirmed that there wasn't any immigration hold on Mejia. Judge Jeffrey Marcuzzo, who set Mejia's bond, said he cannot comment on the open case. The police department said it's possible that Mejia isn't in Omaha anymore.

There is Spaghetti Feed scheduled to help fundraise for Sarah Root’s family:

Saturday, March 19th

5 pm: dinner/silent auction

The Mile Away Hall

20270 Old Lincoln Highway in Council Bluffs

http://www.ketv.com/news/community-a...-hold/38026564

Illegal Alien Killer Protected by Nebraska ‘Sanctuary City’ Vanishes After Paying Bond



by KATIE MCHUGH
18 Feb 2016
858 comments

Thanks to the Omaha police department’s refusal to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and ICE’s failure to issue a detainer, illegal alien murderer Eswin Mejia is on the run and may never serve time for killing a young woman.

The Honduran Mejia, 19, killed 21-year-old Sarah Root while allegedly street racing on January 31, rear-ending her so hard she succumbed to her fatal injuries that same night. Police found Mejia’s blood-alcohol level was four times the legal limit, and the alien had “a suspended driver’s license.”

Root had graduated from Bellevue University with a 4.0 GPA just the day before.

Although Mejia faced up to 20 years in prison for killing Root, Judge Jeffrey Marcuzzo set Mejia’s bond at $50,000. Mejia’s brother paid the necessary $5,000–ten percent–and the illegal promptly disappeared, rubbing salt in the mourning Root family’s wounds.

Police did not contact Root’s family to warn them they freed their daughter’s killer.

“I agree with everything you have all written,” the victim’s mother told KMTV. “Those are all questions we have. If it wasn’t for my ex-husband checking every day with the investigators, we wouldn’t have known [Mejia] was released. This is such a big nightmare. We will not stop until we get justice for my baby girl. She deserves that.”

“We would like call attention however to the fact that we laid her to rest yesterday, and the cost of a bond cost less than a funeral,” said the young woman’s father at a February vigil.

WOWT NBC Nebraska noted Mejia was a noted flight risk and police only bothered with him after he kept committing crimes on the road:

Court records show that Mejia skipped a court date in 2014 in relation to a traffic violation — he only went to court when he was charged with a second offense in 2015 and was subsequently taken into custody.

Furious community members began to demand answers from police.

“Why he let him out on such a low bond when the county attorney was asking for a higher bond? Why wasn’t there a detainer on him? Why didn’t they call ICE to come get him?” asked co-founder of the Burlington Road Neighborhood Association Rebecca Barrientos-Patlan. Police reluctantly confirmed to KETV NewsWatch 7 Mejia was “undocumented,” rushing to add they didn’t want to “focus” on the fact. Yet they knew Mejia was an illegal alien before his bond hearing after investigating his background.

Until Wednesday, neither police nor local media coverage thought it concerned Americans that an extremely drunk illegal alien street racing with a suspended license killed a beautiful young woman, preferring to frame the horrific — and entirely preventable — crash as a routine traffic accident. Blackouts of this kind of critical information encourage Americans to accept that their streets will be terrorized by invaders and their daughters can be mangled to death at illegals’ leisure. Mejia is identified as “man,” “teen,” “suspect” in local news coverage. Nothing to see here. Needless to say, the “Black Lives Matter” and “undocumented immigrant”-obsessed national media outlet ignored Root’s death.

Omaha Deputy Police Chief Dave Baker told RadioIowa police allowed Mejia to go free even after investigators demanded a detainer:

"As a local law enforcement agency, we’re not empowered to enforce federal immigration laws however, we do work with the immigration authorities on a federal level. In this case, the individual, Mr. Mejia, was in our country illegally. He was from Honduras. We do attempt to make sure the judge is aware the individual is in the country illegally, not on the basis of whether the individual is guilty or not guilty. It does not effect what charges they are charged with on a local or a state basis. It has to do with whether or not there is a flight risk. Our accident investigator did request a detainer; however, one was not issued or granted prior to him bonding out. His brother did bond him out before the detainer was issued. My understanding was that he was bonded out fairly quickly."

According to the non-partisan Centers for Immigration Studies, Douglas County is a “sanctuary city” and will not honor ICE detainers without a warrant.

Mejia had several warrants for his arrest before killing Root and is believed to have fled the U.S. by now. Root’s needless death is the latest in a tsunami of immigrant crimes indulged by every level of government. Her death bears a grim resemblance to Kate Steinle’s murder last July at the hands of an illegal alien shielded by San Francisco’s “sanctuary city” policy.

How many more Americans are be killed at the hands of illegal aliens before the political class will lift a finger to stop the bloodshed remains to be seen.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...r-paying-bond/

ICE: Street-Racing Illegal Alien Arrested for Killing Iowa Woman ‘Did Not Meet ICE’s Enforcement Priorities’

The Family of Sarah Root

by KATIE MCHUGH
22 Feb 2016

U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chose not to honor a request for an immigration detainer after Omaha police arrested illegal alien Eswin Mejia after he struck and killed 21-year-old Sarah Root while driving drunk and street-racing the night of January 31. Mejia vanished shortly after posting bond.

According to Omaha’s World-Herald, Omaha Police accident investigator Dawn Turnbull repeatedly requested ICE detain Mejia after his arrest, to no avail. Despite facing up to 20 years in prison, the illegal alien was not determined a flight risk and ICE, following the Obama administration’s “priority enforcement program” (PEP), refused to detain him.

ICE spokesman Shawn Neudauer said in a statement to Breitbart News:

At the time of his January 2016 arrest in Omaha on local criminal charges, Eswin Mejia, 19, of Honduras, did not meet ICE’s enforcement priorities, as stated by the Nov. 20, 2014 civil enforcement memo issued by Secretary Johnson, because he had no prior significant misdemeanor or felony conviction record. As such, ICE did not lodge a detainer. Mejia is scheduled to go before an immigration judge on March 23, 2017, and it will be up to the immigration courts under the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) to determine whether he has a legal basis to remain in the U.S.

How immigration courts can expect to determine whether or not Sarah Root’s illegal alien killer can remain in the U.S. when Mejia is nowhere to be found is unclear.

The World-Herald broke down a timeline of neglect on both the local and federal levels:

• Mejia, who was listed on his jail booking sheet as from Honduras and not a U.S. citizen, was graded a low risk to flee by Douglas County pretrial release officials, despite the fact that he had a warrant and twice had failed to appear in court. On a scale of 1 to 7 — the higher the number, the more risk of fleeing — the county’s pretrial release staff graded Mejia a 2.
• On Feb. 4, Douglas County Judge Jeff Marcuzzo set Mejia’s bail at 10 percent of $50,000 — meaning that Mejia had to post $5,000 cash to be released. The newspaper’s review of 10 motor vehicle homicide cases filed in Nebraska over the past two years showed that five judges set the same bail amount. Five other judges set higher bail amounts — 10 percent of $75,000, $250,000 (twice) and $500,000 (twice). All of the other defendants were U.S. citizens.
• It’s not clear whether the judge was informed of Mejia’s immigration status. Deputy Omaha Police Chief Dave Baker said late Friday that an accident investigator informed Deputy Douglas County Attorney Matt Kuhse of Mejia’s ICE status before Mejia was released from Nebraska Medical Center.
• In considering bail, a transcript shows, Marcuzzo did not give prosecutors a chance to state their position — something every judge typically does.
• After not receiving a chance to speak about bail, Deputy Douglas County Attorney David Wear did not interrupt Judge Marcuzzo. Nor did anyone object after the judge set bail at 10 percent of $50,000.
• Root’s father called Omaha Police accident investigator Dawn Turnbull concerned about Mejia’s bail amount.
• Turnbull repeatedly called ICE about detaining Mejia “due to bond amount and elevated flight risk,” Baker said. Eventually, Baker said, “her request is denied.” She and her lieutenant tried to call an ICE supervisor. The call was never returned, Baker said.

The bond hearing took less than two minutes, according to the report.

Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine told the World-Herald:

The judge just went, ‘Bam, here’s the bond.’ He’s running the show in terms of how the hearing’s conducted. We weren’t given an opportunity to speak. In some ways, I wish our person would have just stopped the proceeding and said, ‘We think that’s an insufficient bond,’ but that didn’t happen. No one’s saying that people need to be profiled. But when we have someone who has been arrested for a serious crime — and they’re not here legally — they have every reason in the world to flee… There has to be a common-sense communication between the feds and the state… For him to be able to evade prosecution is tremendously frustrating to us. And I know that’s true for [Sarah Root’s] family and for police as well.

The Obama administration’s PEP program discourages ICE agents from enforcing immigration law every time an alien violates it: “PEP… further restricts the criteria for deportation,” wrote the Center for Immigration Studies director of policy Jessica Vaughan in 2015. “Now, only certain convicted felons, offenders with three separate misdemeanor convictions, and some new illegal arrivals will be considered appropriate for deportation. And ICE officers are told to make exceptions even to these categories if certain factors exist, such as family or community ties, illness, pregnancy, or other exceptions… National sanctuary policies like PEP are a tragedy waiting to happen.”

The day before the crash, Root graduated from Bellvue University with a 4.0 GPA and a B.S. in crime investigation. A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to help her family as they mourn her loss.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...nt-priorities/