Technicians with the San Francisco Police Forensic Crime Laboratory determined Friday that a .40-caliber handgun recovered from the bay near Pier 14 was the gun that fired the shot that killed Kate Steinle.
Steinle, 32, succumbed to her injuries two hours later despite lifesaving efforts by her father and by San Francisco police and paramedics who responded to the scene, according to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.
Passersby helped police with cell phone photos of a suspect, since identified as Francisco Sanchez, who was arrested a mile south along the waterfront.
Sanchez pleaded innocent to murder and other charges this week.
But witnesses told police that Sanchez, who reportedly was in the United States illegally from Mexico, tossed the gun off the pier into the bay after the July 1 shooting, the newspaper said.
Sanchez had previously been arrested and deported five times by U.S. authorities.
Sanchez told a local television station in a jailhouse interview that he found the gun wrapped in a T-shirt under a bench along the waterfront and that the gun went off when he was shooting at sea lions.
Pier 14 is located south of the Ferry Building and just north of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
The gun had been stolen from a car owned by a ranger with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, an agency that administers hundreds of millions of acres of public lands primarily in the west.
The theft had been reported immediately to San Francisco police but the BLM had not yet started its own investigation when Steinle was killed, the newspaper said.
BLM spokeswoman Dana Wilson said the ranger was visiting San Francisco on government business when a bag containing the weapon was stolen from the car, which was parked in city’s downtown when it was broken into, the newspaper said.
“At this time, the BLM’s primary focus is to cooperate with the ongoing stolen weapon investigation and any other related investigations being conducted by San Francisco law enforcement agencies,” Wilson said.
San Francisco police searched the area for witnesses and surveillance cameras after the car break-in but found no evidence that would have enabled them to recover the stolen gun, the newspaper said.
