As so often is the case, the murder suspect on the front page of today's Washington Post is an illegal alien, but the paper does not report it.
It was a particularly brutal, senseless murder of a good samaritan by an illegal from Guatemala, a now 27-year-old man. Julio Miguel Blanco Garcia was in a suburban Virginia shopping center with his one-year-old daughter; he asked a woman, apparently a stranger to him, to drive him to the hospital. She agreed; she made a wrong turn and this caused Garcia, apparently crazed by drugs, to think she was about to turn him in to the police. He then repeatedly stabbed her with a knife, as he told police investigators.
The car crashed. Garcia then crawled out to the sunlight, pulled his child out, and walked away from the scene, leaving the driver to die.
This distinguished guest in our country has a long arrest record and was finally caught when his fingerprints showed up on some bottles of champagne he was trying to steal. When confronted, he confessed to the murder but his lawyers say he was high on PCP at the time and now can't get a fair trial because of all the publicity over the mysterious murder of 19-year old Vanessa Pham back in 2010.
All of these details were revealed this week, according to the Post, in a set of court filings made public by the prosecution prior to Garcia's forthcoming trial. The electronic version of the Post story carried a link to the original police report of the interview with Garcia, which can be seen here.
Neither the police report, which said that Garcia had come to the United States in 2002 and gave other personal details about him, nor the Post article, revealed his illegal presence in the United States. Most other reporting also ignored his civil status. However, a local e-news operation, the Fairfax City Patch, did report that a hold had been placed on Garcia by ICE. That agency had identified him as an illegal alien.
Garcia, according to the Post, had been arrested several times prior to the murder; had he simply been deported after any one of these arrests, Ms. Pham would be alive today.
I guess that's not news at the Washington Post.
