Before Springfield, Ohio, became the target of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant scaremongering, San Francisco was his city of choice. Back in 2015, with just a few months until Election Day, he spoke about all the Americans he felt had been wronged by migrants entering the country from Mexico.
“Another victim is Kate Steinle,” he raged. “Gunned down in the sanctuary city of San Francisco by an illegal immigrant deported five previous times. And they knew he was no good!”
Two months earlier, Steinle, a 32-year-old sales representative for a medical device company, had been shot and killed while walking with her father on Pier 14. The bullet was fired by José Ines García Zárate, an undocumented immigrant, who was charged with murder. His trial wouldn’t take place until after Trump had won the election, in part by using the story to paint Mexicans entering the United States as dangerous criminals. Jurors eventually concluded that the shooting was not deliberate, the result of a freak accident in which the defendant had stooped to investigate a bundle of clothes on the ground, not knowing that a firearm was concealed within them, and set it off by mistake, with the bullet rebounding — ricocheting — off the ground and into Steinle’s back.
In “Ricochet,” a documentary now available on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, filmmakers Chihiro Wimbush and the late San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi document the trial and argue that the misrepresentation of the killing helped Trump move into the White House.
Wimbush spoke to The Standard on a video call less than two weeks before the 2024 election. He took over as the film’s sole director after Adachi died in 2019. The initial aim was to release the film before the 2020 election, but production stalled and the film was held back, with only a selection of critics and film industry types seeing it on the festival circuit. It’s not lost on Wimbush that the timing of the film’s general release makes “Ricochet” even more political than it already is.
“When Trump rode down the golden escalator to announce his candidacy, he was talking about ‘Mexican rapists’ and all that kind of thing, as if they’re all criminals coming into the country. Now it’s ‘Haitians who eat dogs,’” he said. “It feels like a critical time for us to remember how we got here.”
Leading up to and during the trial in 2017, Trump and the prosecution portrayed García Zárate as a crazed felon who was hell-bent on killing. The media fed into the narrative too. As the trial hit the news, CNN told viewers about “defense experts claiming that it was a ricochet,” despite the prosecution agreeing that the bullet had bounced off the ground before hitting Steinle. Reporting on Fox News was even less grounded in reality, as Bill O’Reilly corralled 400,000 viewers into signing a petition asking Congress to pass “Kate’s Law,” mandating that any illegal immigrant convicted of a felony who returns to the United States post-deportation serve at least five years in federal prison. Critics noted at the time that the proposed law wouldn’t have protected Steinle at all, because of García Zárate’s already complicated trip through the American legal system.
The movie takes you through García Zárate’s life story. He left Mexico in search of work and was convicted on a drug charge in Arizona in 1991. Between then and 2013, he served several stints behind bars and was deported five times, only to reenter the States each time. After ending up in a medical facility in Victorville, he was taken to San Francisco to be tried on a marijuana charge from 1995. But the case was too old for the state to pursue, and when ICE ordered that García Zárate be detained for deportation, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department refused the request. Under the city’s sanctuary policies, illegal immigrants are protected from deportation unless they have been convicted of violent crimes. That was weaponized by Trump in his anti-immigration plight.
As protagonists, the film offers Matt Gonzalez and Francisco Ugarte, public defenders tasked with proving García Zárate innocent of both murder and manslaughter. An elusive pursuit of truth also guides the film’s director, who marks Trump’s misuse of García Zárate and Steinle’s story as the beginning of a fraying of reality that has only worsened since.
“When I was on the film festival circuit with the film, everyone I talked to remembered this incident, and they knew about the shooting. But most people didn’t remember the facts of the case or even what the verdict was,” Wimbush notes. “If you’re not aware there was a ricochet when the gun was shot, that can completely change your perception of the case. Somehow the facts get lost in the story.”
Wimbush admits that he wants to influence voters as we near the presidential election. An anti-Trump agenda is “99 percent of the reason we’re pushing it out” right now, he said.
“Ricochet” is now available to rent or buy on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.