By Michelle Malkin · November 10, 2006 12:12 PM

Unless Americans of all political stripes band together to stop the coming amnesty, Washington will adopt another disastrous policy that values the "cheap labor" of illegal alien murder suspect Diego Pillco over the life of a beautiful wife and mother whose only crime was to stand up to a lawless thug.
On election day, I was in New York City. You know what a lot of New Yorkers were buzzing about that day?

Not the election.

They were buzzing about a tragic story that has disappeared under the national MSM radar screen--even though folks who live in the city (including journalists) are still talking about it around the water cooler and the local tabloids have covered it wall-to-wall.

Last week, a veteran indie-film actress was found dead:

The body of a beautiful, talented actress was hanging from a shower rod in the bathtub of a Greenwich Village apartment by her horrified husband, who cried out, "Why? Why?" cops and witnesses said.
Adrienne Shelly, 40, who was also a director and screenwriter, apparently killed herself, cops said, but added they're examining some mysterious aspects of the case.

Shelly's husband is Andy Ostroy, a liberal blogger whom I've linked and had cordial communications with in the past, despite heated political differences. Ostroy insisted passionately that his wife would never commit suicide and leave him and their three-year-old daughter behind. After intensive questioning by police, Ostroy refused to accept the suicide theory and pushed the NYPD to find the truth. On Election Day, the New York Post reported the bombshell discovery:

In a stunning turnaround, a construction worker yesterday confessed to killing indie actress Adrienne Shelly, whose death in a Greenwich Village apartment last week was first thought to be suicide, cops said.
"I was having a bad day," illegal immigrant Diego Pillco, 19, allegedly told cops. "I didn't mean to kill her. But I did kill her."

He was having a bad day?! Evil bastard.

Pillco told detectives that he punched Shelly, 40, last Wednesday afternoon outside the Abingdon Square apartment she was using as an office after she yelled at him about the noise he was making while working in a vacant apartment below.

Pillco, who is from Ecuador and speaks only Spanish, also claimed that Shelly slapped him first.

After seeing she was unconscious and believing she was dead, Pillco claimed, he dragged Shelly into her apartment, wrapped a bed sheet around her neck and attached it to a shower rod in the bathroom to make it appear she had hanged herself, sources said. The medical examiner has not yet released autopsy results.

Shelly's marketing-exec husband, Andrew Ostroy, found her body just before 6 that evening.

Pillco was nabbed early yesterday at his Brooklyn apartment after detectives matched several Reebok sneaker prints from the toilet seat in Shelly's bathroom to a print they found in the apartment downstairs.

Pillco's boss told detectives the laborer had been wearing sneakers while working.

Reebok Allen Iverson-model sneakers found at Pillco's home matched the prints, sources said.

The suspect's stunned boss, contractor Louis Hernandez, called his employee "a good kid."

This "good kid" was an illegal alien day laborer whose employer knew he was illegal. He lived and worked in an illegal alien sanctuary city whose open-border policies were crafted by Democrat Mayor Ed Koch and embraced by GOP successors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. He lived and worked under a Bush administration whose employer sanctions enforcement record is abysmal.

Yup, Pillco was just a hard-working immigrant "doing a job Americans wouldn't do"--as new best friends President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would put it. Details:

A native of the city of Cuenca, Pillco arrived in the United States in the summer of 2005 after paying smugglers $12,000 to sneak him over the Mexican border, law-enforcement sources said.
Pillco eventually made his way to Brooklyn, where he moved into a basement apartment with his brother Wilson - who had arrived months earlier - at 328 Prospect Ave., where a cousin also lived.

His landlord, Louis Hernandez, hired Pillco to work as a part-time helper for his construction company, even though - by his own admission - he knew the immigrant did not have legal working papers.

Shelly was not afraid to stand up to Pillco and fought hard for her life:

A 19-year-old construction worker flipped out, hitting and strangling indie actress Adrienne Shelly with a bed sheet because she dared to call him a "son of a bitch," police sources said yesterday.

Ecuadorian illegal immigrant Diego Pillco told cops he took that insult literally and became enraged during a confrontation with the pint-sized actress last week over noise he was making in the apartment below her Greenwich Village office, sources said.

Police also revealed that Shelly, 40, desperately tried to fight off the baby-faced worker during the attack, leaving scratch marks on his face.

"She didn't go easily," said a law-enforcement source.

Adrienne Shelly put up a battle.

If only spineless politicians in both parties who have created a ripe atmosphere for such crimes would do the same.

Instead, we have Republicans--you know, the party of law and order--preparing to cut and run at the border and hand over a mass illegal alien amnesty to the Dems.

Open-borders pundits on the right are falsely characterizing the midterm election results as a repudiation of the immigration enforcement movement. Leading the charge, as always, is the Wall Street Journal, which gloated over losses by border-control Republicans Reps. John Hostettler, Randy Graf, and J.D. Hayworth as electoral rejection of strict enforcement of immigration laws.

Here's what the WSJ wrote about Hostettler today:

Indiana incumbent John Hostettler, who chairs a House subcommittee on immigration and is one of his party's most outspoken restrictionists, managed to win just 39% of the vote in his losing bid for a seventh term. Mr. Hostettler's district is so Republican that John Kerry won only 38% of the vote there in 2004.

Here's what the WSJ didn't tell you. Hostettler's Democrat opponent, Sheriff Brad Ellsworth, won by campaigning to the right on every major issue--and making illegal immigration a felony a top priority.

As for Graf: The GOP spent $250,000 in his primary trying to prevent him from winning. After he won, the GOP elites canceled $1 million in advertising support for the general election. GOP knives in his back. Plus Dem frontal assaults from smear-job supporters of Dem candidate Gabrielle Giffords. Plus dissatisfaction with the national GOP. That was the recipe for the Graf loss--not his full-throated support for immigration enforcement.

Rush Limbaugh's assessment of the J.D. Hayworth race (which, by the way, hasn't officially been called yet) gets it right:

J.D. Hayworth led the fight in Congress on the Republican side against illegal immigration. He lost. Now, the details of his loss are being totally misrepresented by the Drive-By Media. He ran against a Democrat who was parroting and echoing everything J.D. was saying. He was making himself out to be an even bigger anti-illegal immigrant guy when he wasn't.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: But the message. Who's going to know that?

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: The Drive-By Media is portraying this as anybody who was really pro-anti-illegal immigration got swept away. They're trying to kill this issue, the Drive-By Media, as they always do. They're trying to massage and write that J.D. Hayworth lost because he came across as nativist, racist, too strident, and anti-Mexican. Now, what message does that send Republicans? If they're the usual weak-kneed Republicans, "Gosh, that's a losing issue. I can't do what J.D. did. I'll lose, too. The media will write that I'm a racist and that I'm a nativist and that I hate Mexicans." So you can't assume that Republicans are going to be voting against this, either.

CALLER: Well, then there's no way we're going to get any majority back if they're going to hide their principles.

It's not just the Drive-By Media that's spinning the results. Out-of-touch GOP elites in Manhattan and Washington are deluding themselves. While they crow about Graf and Hayworth's losses in Arizona, voters in that state approved four immigration-related ballot measures by resoundingly wide margins: banning state subsidies to illegal aliens for education and child care; denying bail to illegal aliens; banning punitive damage awards to illegals; and declaring English the state’s official language. In Colorado, pro-enforcement measures passed requiring the state attorney general to sue the federal government for failing to enforce immigration laws and deny tax credits to employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. Top Dem winners Claire McCaskill and Jim Webb and other Blue Dog Dems adopted tough-on-borders postures. Open-borders pundits swallowed ridiculously biased exit poll questions, notes Mark Krikorian, to bolster their unreality-based conclusions.

While the commentariat argues about the political costs and benefits of immigration policy, innocent Americans and law-abiding residents are left to grapple with the bloody consequences of lax immigration enforcement, failed deportation policies, failed employer sanctions, unchecked illegal alien smuggling, and crime-abetting sanctuary cities.

The horrifying murder of Adrienne Shelly is just the latest addition to the human toll of open borders that no one in Washington wants to tally.

Unless Americans of all political stripes band together to stop the coming amnesty, Washington will adopt another disastrous policy that values the "cheap labor" of illegal alien murder suspect Diego Pillco over the life of a beautiful wife and mother whose only crime was to stand up to a lawless thug.

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