I held off on posting this, hoping to find a better photo of the victims, Dan and Maureen McKenzie, who were killed by an unlicensed illegal alien driver; what's showing is a screen snap from a tiny video on this page: Illegal Immigrant Gets 8-Year Sentence For Double Fatal York Co. Crash (WSOC TV, Charlotte, September 2, 2009).
This case was another preventable crime caused by open borders and permissive immigration enforcement. The convicted killer, Maria Garcia Sanchez, had been found guilty of driving without a license three times previously.
A deadly York County accident landed an illegal immigrant in prison for eight years.
Witnesses said 29-year-old Maria Garcia Sanchez never hit the brakes and never swerved when she drove across four lanes of traffic and slammed head-on into a pickup truck last spring. In that truck was a Charlotte couple, 58-year-old Dan McKenzie, and his wife, 64-year-old Maureen.
"It was like murder. I think my sister was murdered. This was no accident," said a sister of Maureen McKenzie on Wednesday in a York County courtroom.
Sanchez was before a judge to plead guilty to two counts of reckless homicide in the deaths, but family members of the victims are outraged that she was driving at all.
Sanchez had been convicted three times for driving without a license and once for driving without insurance. Prosecutors said Sanchez never had a license at all or any training on how to drive a car.
"She was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off," said Deputy Solicitor Willy Thompson. "She said she was driving that day because she didn't have a ride to work, but the investigation showed that wasn't the case. She often drove."
The McKenzies were originally from Hartford, Conn., and moved to Charlotte for a job in 2001. On Wednesday, a dozen family members and a neighbor showed up in court to stand up for them and see justice served. For their daughter, Tracy Pentalow, her parents' deaths are even more unfathomable because the woman responsible shouldn't have been on the road at all.
"It's horrifying that they can get away with it, and keep walking away when something like this happens, until two lives are lost," Pentalow said.
In court, Thompson said Sanchez was a woman who simply didn't care about the law and had a clear history of reckless driving.
Sanchez apologized to the McKenzie family through an interpreter because she speaks no English. However, according to her attorney, she does not believe she acted recklessly.
The killer of two believes she did nothing wrong. When the government allows illegal aliens to commit serial crimes with no punishment (unlicensed driving, in this case), they become intoxicated with the idea that their illegal behavior is actually their right.
Drunk and unlicensed driving are considered minor crimes by the legal system, a notion encouraged by the illegal alien boosters like La Raza that fight to keep even dangerous criminal aliens in this country by working against law enforcement strategies that work, like 287(g).
Finally, eight years imprisonment is not an adequate sentence for causing the death of two people. Illegal aliens who kill, even accidentally, should receive a mandatory life sentence.
