The illegal alien who murdered a father and two sons in San Francisco in 2008 not only evaded deportation with the city’s help but also had murdered before, the San Francisco Chronicle has revealed. Even worse, the FBI knew it and did nothing.
According to the Chronicle, an informant from the Salvadoran MS-13 gang told the FBI that Edwin Ramos, convicted on July 30 for murdering 49-year-old Tony Bologna and his sons, Michael and Matthew, had murdered a gang foe before he cut down the three Bolognas in a hail of gunfire. Another son, Andrew, survived the attack.
The revelation adds another shocking detail to the story of an illegal alien who received the protection of leftist San Francisco officials in defiance of federal immigration law.
The Murder
Last week, a jury convicted Ramos of killing the three men. The Bologna patriarch and his three sons were headed home from a family barbecue when Ramos, a member of MS-13, opened fire from another car, thinking one of the happy trio was a “Mission District gang rival,” as the Chronicle put it. The paper continued,
Assistant District Attorney Harry Dorfman, the lead prosecutor on the case, portrayed Ramos as a seemingly charming but cold-blooded killer who shot the Bolognas in a misguided attempt to avenge a compatriot in the MS-13 gang.
The friend had been shot and wounded earlier that day.
With no murder weapon or ballistics tests to link Ramos to the shootings, the prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Andrew Bologna. He said the family had almost gotten home from the Fairfield gathering when Ramos blocked their car at Congdon and Maynard streets with his Chrysler 300, then rolled alongside and opened fire.
Unsurprisingly, Ramos’s attorneys argued that he didn’t do it, blaming the killing on a gang pal who became enraged when he and Ramos were on the way to the hospital to see their injured friend.
The jury didn’t buy it, although it was hung on two charges,said the Chronicle.
San Francisco City Officials to Blame
As The New American reported in October 2009, the city was running a sanctuary program that protected illegal-alien criminals from deportation.
Just after Ramos gunned down the Bolognas, the Chronicle reported that he was one of the many “youths,” as the newspaper called them, whom the sanctuary city protected from deportation.
Ramos, a native of El Salvador whom prosecutors say is a member of a violent street gang, was found guilty of two felonies as a juvenile — a gang-related assault on a Muni passenger and the attempted robbery of a pregnant woman — according to authorities familiar with his background.
In neither instance did officials with the city’s Juvenile Probation Department alert federal immigration authorities, because it was the city agency’s policy not to consider immigration status when deciding how to deal with an offender. Had city officials investigated, they would have found that Ramos lacked legal status to remain in the United States.
Federal officials then began a probe of the city’s “migrant offender shield,” which required city taxpayers to pay to fly illegals back home “with carte blanche to return.”
The Chronicle kept digging and then revealed just how dangerous — and in the Bolognas’ case, how deadly — the city’s sanctuary policy had become.
The newspaper revealed that the city had protected 185 “juvenile offenders” from deportation. At the time, leftist Mayor Gavin Newsome had decided the city would hand illegal alien criminals over to federal authorities. The city’s board of supervisors, led by a former illegal alien, overruled him.
According to the paper, a report from the city “shows that between Jan. 1, 2005, and Feb. 28 of this year, 252 undocumented youths had cases in the juvenile probation system.” It continued,
It also shows 67 have been turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials since July when The Chronicle revealed that the city was paying for flights home and $7,000-a-month group homes for the young offenders instead of turning them over to federal officials. It’s unclear how many, if any, of those 67 ultimately were deported.
That means as many as 185 youths were shielded under San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy in the 3 1/2 years before Mayor Gavin Newsom implemented the switch. He said the sanctuary-city policy was intended to allow undocumented immigrants to access services and report crimes without fear of deportation — but not to protect criminals.
Of the 252 undocumented youths who were detained, 180 were suspected of drug offenses. The report focuses almost exclusively on those cases and gives no indication as to why the other 72 youths had cases in the system.
He Had Killed Before
The continuing revelations about Ramos and San Francisco’s handling of the murderer were shocking enough. But they got worse this week. Again, the Chronicle revealed:
An informant told the FBI in 2006 that Edwin Ramos had killed a gang rival in the Mission District, records show, raising questions about why Ramos wasn’t taken off the streets before his infamous slaying of a man and his two sons in San Francisco in 2008.
A former leader of MS-13, Jaime Martinez, whose sister was married to Ramos, met with FBI agents in April 2006, two years before Ramos opened fire on the Bolognas.
According to the Chronicle,
Martinez told the agents that Ramos, also an MS-13 member, had killed a rival Norteño nicknamed “Chino,” using a disguise to sneak up on him and shoot him at 25th and Capp streets, according to the legal filing last week by attorney Dennis Riordan.
Riordan said the information is in an FBI report summarizing an interview by an agent, filed April 11, 2006.
Two weeks before the FBI interview, Rolando “Chino” Valladares, 21, had been gunned down at the Mission District intersection. No one has ever been arrested in the killing, and a police spokesman declined to discuss it, citing the “open investigation.”
And the truth about Ramos came from more than one source, said the Chronicle:
Defense attorneys in the federal case said Ramos had been a target of the probe for about three years before the Bologna killings.
He was not among those indicted.
A January 2011 court filing in the case by defense attorney Martin Sabelli said federal authorities had repeatedly been told of criminal acts by Ramos — that he carried a pistol, brokered gun sales, took part in a gunfight with rivals and sold cocaine.
Federal authorities “could have arrested him at any time and either charged him with criminal offenses or deported him to his native El Salvador,” Sabelli wrote.
Understandably, the Bologna family is shaken by the news, said the Chronicle. “It’s been very frustrating for the family to know that Ramos may have committed other crimes, and had been the subject of a federal investigation prior to the [Bologna] murders, and yet he was left on the streets,” a family spokesman told the newspaper. “There’s no question that’s been very upsetting news for them to hear.”
The question is what this means now, given that the Obama administration, in the wake of the decision from the U.S. Supreme Court upholding much of Arizona’s tough immigration law, has said it will not deport any DREAMers or help local law enforcement agencies rid their communities of illegals. As The New American has been reporting for more than a year, the Obama administration has declared the DREAM Act federal law.
Photo: San Francisco Skyline via Shutterstock
