(SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS) SAN FRANCISCO — The bullet that killed Kate Steinle on Pier 14 last month as she walked with her father was fired accidentally, a ballistics expert testified Thursday on behalf of the man charged with her murder.
“The gun was pointed at the ground,” James Norris, the former head of the San Francisco Police crime lab, said repeatedly on the stand Thursday during the preliminary hearing of Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a Mexican national and five-time deportee who has ignited a national debate on illegal immigration and drawn the ire of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Out of court, Norris called the shooting an accident. “You couldn’t do this on purpose,” he said of intentionally ricocheting a shot and hitting a person roughly 100 feet away.
