A known member of the MS-13 gang and illegal alien, Edwin Ramos, murdered a 48-year-old man and two of his sons just months after being arrested but unprosecuted by Harris’s office. Ramos had been convicted twice on felony charges when he was a juvenile, but he was protected from immigration officials due to L.A.’s sanctuary city policy.
Three months before the horrific murder, Ramos had a run-in with the San Francisco police. The San Francisco Gate reports that police warned Harris’s office that Ramos had multiple run-ins with the law and was known to be a member of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang. However, Harris’s office declined to prosecute him despite his record.
An account of that arrest in the Los Angeles Times notes that Ramos was released after spending a few days in jail. Moreover, deportation proceedings against him could have been initiated but were not, apparently due to some sort of mix-up between the Immigration, Customs and Enforcement Agency and the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department running the jail. ICE Spokesman Tim Counts stated that the jail only contacted federal immigrations once, two hours after Ramos’s release.
That was in March 2008. In June of that year, 48-year-old Tony Bologna and his three sons, aged 20, 18 and 16, were driving home from a San Francisco family barbecue when Ramos, who was driving alongside them, randomly opened fire. Tony and two of his sons were killed. According to prosecutors, Ramos shot the Bologna family after misidentifying them as members of a rival gang involved in a gang murder earlier that day.
The mother of the two boys who were heartlessly shot down, Danielle Bologna, along with various activist groups, called on then-DA Harris to seek the death penalty in this case.
Danielle Bologna told the Los Angeles Times: “I took my son off life support two days after his dad and brother were murdered. It was the most difficult part of my entire life to look at my baby and know he was gone…”
“We used to have six. Now we have half,” she added, and she must now raise her surviving two children on her own.
Bologna’s lawyer said “the city of San Francisco has let her down and her family down” thanks to Harris’s refusal to seek the death penalty in that case.
Harris also came under fire for not seeking the death penalty for a police officer's murder
Harris, who opposes capital punishment, also came under fire for not seeking the death penalty for the murder of a police officer in San Francisco earlier in her career. Isaac Espinoza was murdered by a gang member, David Hill, with an AK-47 in 2004.
California Attorney General at the time, Bill Lockyer, threatened to take over the case because of the way it was handled, saying: "Those who murder a law enforcement officer need to know -- and also the district attorneys should know -- that if you make charging decisions based on personal philosophy, not on facts, I will take the case away from you and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law."
Harris has called the death penalty “immoral, discriminatory, ineffective, and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars.” Part of Biden and Harris’s agenda for the White House includes scrapping the death penalty entirely and instituting a nationwide sanctuary policy that will fight states that have committed to cooperation with federal immigration officials.
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