Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson is convinced his staff alerted immigration officials to suspicions that Francis Hernandez was in the country illegally in April.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Tim Counts is just as adamant that the agency became aware of Hernandez, 23, only after he was arrested for allegedly causing an accident that killed three people in Aurora last week.
The disagreement is just one example of the finger-pointing triggered by the suspect, who is in the country illegally.
Arapahoe County deputies sent an e-mail to ICE asking the federal agency to check on Hernandez when he was booked into the county jail April 25, Robinson said.
On Tuesday, Counts said ICE employees in Vermont, where such an e-mail would go, looked for the message and didn’t find it.
A local ICE supervisor worked with Arapahoe County and Aurora officials to try to track down the e-mail in Colorado.
“We haven’t been able to find any evidence that ICE was contacted,” Counts said.
Robinson agreed but said he trusts the word of staffers who said the message was sent. He also said that ICE wouldn’t have responded to local suspicions about Hernandez because he was arrested on a misdemeanor traffic violation.
The agency is deluged with e-mails like the one sent by Arapahoe County.
“(Hernandez) wasn’t a felon in April. Typically, they wouldn’t put a detainer on a misdemeanor, and certainly not on a traffic violator,” Robinson said.
A detainer is an order to hold a prisoner and release him or her only to ICE. Had Arapahoe County done so, Hernandez would have been behind bars Thursday rather than at the wheel of a Chevrolet Suburban.
But Counts said ICE would have flagged Hernandez, who had a lengthy rap sheet.
“That is absolutely not true. We check a person’s criminal history. One look at his rap sheet and we would have been on him in a flash. It is safe to say this man would have been a high priority for us.”
Hernandez had been arrested 16 times in five years, mostly on traffic charges, by last Thursday when he was taken into custody in Aurora after the accident.
Police say Hernandez crashed an SUV into a Mazda pickup that was turning into a Good Times restaurant in Aurora. The accident sent the pickup into a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop, killing two women in the truck and a 3-year-old boy waiting for ice cream.
The accident has ignited a political firestorm over illegal immigration in Colorado, with Republicans saying Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter hasn’t fulfilled campaign promises to solve the problem.
Ritter spoke on radio station KOA’s “Mike Rosen Show” on Tuesday, saying ICE doesn’t have the staffing needed to act on cases sent to it by local police.
“You know, you have this many arrests and not (to do) first of all an investigation into his status here is, I think, a difficult question to answer and . . . it’s something we clearly have to fix,” Ritter said on KOA.
Robinson agrees that ICE doesn’t have the local staffing to handle the job.
In fiscal year 2007, Counts said, ICE identified 4,545 illegal immigrants in Colorado jails and prisons and placed all of them in deportation proceedings.
“Criminals are a high priority for us,” he said.
Aurora police stopped Hernandez on April 25 for speeding and failing to signal for a turn. They found he had two outstanding warrants for failure to appear in Adams and Arapahoe counties.
The arresting officer suspected Hernandez was in the country illegally, said Bob Friel, spokesman for the Aurora Police Department.
Police officers understand how frustrated people are that Hernandez remained on the street after so many arrests, Friel said. But police don’t hand down sentences and don’t have the power to investigate legal status, he added.
Hernandez is a Guatemalan who entered the country illegally in 1991. He was driving a vehicle that didn’t belong to him, but Friel said Tuesday that investigators aren’t ready to identify the owner.
9News contributed to this report.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
Rites for victims
The funeral for 3-year-old Marten Kudlis will be at 10 a.m. today at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver.
A funeral Mass will be said for Patricia Guntharp at 7 p.m. today at Horan & McConaty Family Chapel in Aurora.
The time of services for Debra Serecky was unavailable Tuesday.
