Posted: 8/21/2006 1:47:06 PM EDT
[#7]
[sarcasm]What a coincidence![/sarcasm] The same thing happened here in my small town. The trooper didn't live though. Read about the scumbag Mexican here: www.theamericancause.org/openseason.htm
Open Season
March 11 2002
James Saunders will never meet the man for whom he is named. He is only three now - born after his policeman father was gunned down in the line of duty.
It began as a routine traffic stop on an unremarkable day. Just after 9 PM at an intersection in downtown Kennewick, Washington, State Trooper Jim Saunders pulled over a green Mazda pick-up. Colleagues would later recall that the seven-year patrol veteran "Wasn't out there to stop cars and give out tickets. He was there to make the roads safer."
No one witnessed the fateful encounter that October evening, but minutes after Saunders called in the license plate, dispatch received a frantic call from a passer-by. Officer down. Shot through the head.
One week later, 2,000 police officers from Arizona to Canada turned out to mourn their fallen comrade. A bell tolled 21 times and bagpipes wailed a Scottish dirge as Saunders' buddies carried him home to Leavenworth, the nearby town where neighbors still remember the high school basketball star turned cop.
While a community wept, Nicolas Solorio Vasquez, sat in jail -- a place familiar to the 28-year-old Mexican national. After all, he had been there three times before. In January 1996, Vasquez was arrested on drug charges and deported. Again in October 1996. Again in October 1997. In July 1999, Vasquez was arrested a fourth time on a cocaine-delivery charge. Though he was in the U.S. illegally and had an extensive criminal record, Vasquez was freed on $5,000 bail. Two months later, he murdered Jim Saunders.
By INS standard procedure, Vasquez should have been detained after local officials faxed Border Patrol that he was a suspected illegal. But the overworked agents failed to notify the jail or take Vasquez into federal custody where his criminal record would have made him ineligible for bail. Instead, he went free, and the Saunders family paid a horrific price. Their story was lost in local papers, but its lesson should ring loud across a country on alert. Nicolas Solorio Vasquez, a known felon, was able to trespass our borders four times to deal drugs and finally commit murder before being intercepted. And while the trooper's family can't contemplate a darker nightmare, in a world with terror on the loose, a similar lapse could have far more catastrophic consequences.
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