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.
H/T: Illegal Alien Crime Report
Email Katie at kmchugh@breitbart.com.