On May 10, a man attired only in a gigantic Latino-fro assaulted several people in a San Francisco BART transit station. Between the attacks, the naked man hopped around performing gymnastic tricks, alluding to his non-psycho day job of public acrobat in the circus troupe ClownSnotBombs, where he presumably wore pants.
This being techie San Francisco, YouTube videos and photos of the incident soon appeared, showing the naked man chasing and grabbing riders, plus pushing one person violently backward onto the floor. The attacker was identified after arrest as Yeiner Perez Garizabalo (known as Yeiner Perez), a citizen of Colombia and illegal alien in this country.
Some locals cracked sick jokes about the episode in online reactions, but it’s clear from the sights and sounds on the videos that what happened was violent and frightening. Perez went after at least two people, as can be see by anyone on the YouTubes.
But there was more. BART maintenance worker Duane Bullard testified at the preliminary hearing that Perez made chimpanzee sounds and fondled himself. “He was jumping up and down going, ‘Oo, oo, oo, oo, oo, oo’ while he was playing with himself,” Bullard said. “That’s when he started approaching me in an aggressive motion.... He’s growling at me at this point, and he’s coming at me with his hands up and his fists balled.”
When Perez jumped upon an elderly man, the victim cried, “My heart, my heart!” An elderly woman’s back was injured when she was pushed by Perez, who also kicked a maintenance worker several times.
It could have been much worse.
Perez clearly presented a danger to public safety, yet he was placed under a psychiatric hold briefly and jailed for only a couple days, then released with a GPS ankle bracelet and told to phone in regularly while his deportation case moved glacially through the courts. One news report said the deportation proceeding could take more than a year.
He was rearrested a month later in June, apparently when authorities figured out that Perez was seriously dangerous, not just weird.
Naturally, Perez has attorneys going to bat for him, and that means downplaying his physical violence as merely a mental breakdown. “People just don’t understand how mental health works,” said his attorney, Paul Myslin. “To make this out to be a felony is outrageous.”
It’s not like San Francisco has no experience with dangerous foreigners. On June 22, 2008, a previously arrested illegal alien, Edwin Ramos, shot and killed Tony Bologna and his two sons in a mistaken-identity gang hit. An MS-13 gangster, Ramos had already been found guilty as a juvenile of two felonies: a gang-related assault on a Muni bus passenger and the attempted robbery of a pregnant woman. But liberal San Francisco’s sanctuary policy overruled public safety and Ramos was not deported, leaving him in the city to commit the triple murder of the law-abiding Bologna family.
As this is being written, the press has been hand-wringing over the many early signs of danger emanating from the Washington Navy Yard shooter, Aaron Alexis. The killer had several violent episodes that brought him to the attention of the authorities, yet this information was not fed into the government’s giant snooper computers to reach the people who handle security clearances. As a result, a mentally troubled violent man was able to enter a secure government facility and murder a dozen people.
As a nation, we spend a lot of money on police, courts, and imprisonment, but public safety is still strangely missing in certain areas. Dangerous illegal aliens are routinely released from jail because those criminals have a strong lobby. One approach would have been for Perez to be sent immediately home to Colombia and treated there for his illness, but the immigration attorneys have lawyered up the deportation process, creating more billable hours.
One thinks of drunk-driving illegal aliens who are not deported after the first crime. Now-retired Congresswoman Sue Myrick worked for years to pass the Scott Gardner Act (named after a crime victim), but with no success. As she said, the bill required, “You’re drunk, you’re driving, you’re illegal, you’re deported, period.”
In 2012 Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) proposed a three-strikes requirement that would have meant deportation after three DUI arrests. However, that law would not have saved Sister Denice Mosier from two-timer drunk driver Carlos Martinelly Montano.
A nation that is serious about public safety would repatriate every lawbreaking foreigner straight from the jailhouse door, but Washington won’t even do the basics of protecting us from violent foreigners.
One could feel better about the Perez case if he had not been freed to run loose for a month. Plus there is no assurance that San Francisco liberals won’t demand that the court require only psychiatric treatment and then free the 24-year-old as an Obama DREAMer.
British politician Enoch Powell wisely observed in 1968, “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”
There is no more preventable evil than repeat illegal alien crime.