Ramos, 27, was gunned down in West Oakland while working on a mural project on the 2500 block of West Street beneath a freeway overpass. The community art project was sponsored by Attitudinal Healing Connection of Oakland, a nonprofit with a mission of breaking cycles of violence through creativity and education.
OPD announced Tuesday that it had made an arrest in the Ramos killing, and would charge 20-year-old Marquise Holloway with murder and multiple counts of robbery.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the gun used to kill Ramos was a Glock 26 pistol, and that the 9mm firearm had been stolen from a rental car parked at Second and South Park streets by two ICE agents visiting from out of town.
This marks the second high-profile Bay Area shooting in the past six months to be linked to the theft of a firearm from a federal agent’s vehicle.
In July, 32-year-old Kate Steinle was shot and killed while walking with her father along San Francisco’s crowded Pier 14. The case touched off a national media firestorm because suspect Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez was released from the custody of the San Francisco Sheriff's Department instead of being turned over to ICE custody.
Steinle's family is pursing legal action against the San Francisco Sheriff's Department and ICE -- but is also suing the federal Bureau of Land Management, alleging a ranger failed to properly secure the handgun when it was stolen from his car parked in San Francisco four days before Steinle was shot.
Nor were these the only recorded gun thefts. A recent NBC Bay Area investigation revealed that more than 500 weapons had gone missing from eight different Bay Area law enforcement agencies.
On Nov. 19 a San Francisco Board of Supervisors committee held a hearing on proposed legislation aimed at preventing gun theft from vehicles parked in the city.
Supervisor David Campos, who authored the legislation, had initially crafted it to apply only to off-duty law enforcement officers employed by the city and county. However, he expanded the proposal to address all cases where firearms could potentially be left unsecured in vehicles.
“It would be the first law in the city and county of San Francisco that would say that if you leave a firearm in your vehicle, there are certain things that you have to do to make sure that the firearm does not end up in the wrong hands,” Campos told KQED’s Tara Siler in a recent interview.
“If the trunk is an enclosed space in the vehicle, you can leave it in the trunk, locked. But if not, then you have to put it in a lock box. This law … addresses what we know is a trend, not only in the Bay Area but also in the rest of the country, where you have a lot of firearms that have been stolen from these vehicles. And they end up being used in pretty heinous crimes.”
