The shooting occurred around 1 a.m. Wednesday, when Ronil Singh, a 33-year-old officer, was gunned down after pulling over a driver he suspected was drunk in east Newman, California, a town of about 10,000 people not far from Modesto. The case was soon thrust into the nation’s fractious debate over immigration when President Donald Trump tweeted about it Thursday afternoon.
“There is a full scale manhunt going on in California for an illegal immigrant accused of shooting and killing a police officer during a traffic stop,” Trump wrote. “Time to get tough on Border Security. Build the Wall!”
Singh, officials said, was an immigrant himself, from Fiji, and had worked for the Newman Police Department since July 2011. He was married and had a 5-month-old son, and after spending Christmas morning with his family went on duty that night.
“I did not know Christmas morning, at four o’clock in the morning when I said goodbye to him and sent him off to his family, that it would be the last time that I saw him,” Randy Richardson, Newman’s police chief, said through tears at a news conference.
Richardson called Singh an “American patriot,” and noted that English was not his first language.
“I believe it was his third language,” said Richardson, who hired Singh. “When I sat with him in the chief’s interview, he told me he came to America to become a police officer. That’s all he wanted to do.”
Officials said they knew the suspect’s name but did not reveal it, although they did release a photograph of a heavyset, dark-haired man from a convenience store, where the man was buying beer. Authorities said they believed the suspect had entered the United States illegally. “He doesn’t belong here; he is a criminal,” Adam Christianson, the Stanislaus County sheriff, said at a news conference.
The suspect’s vehicle, a silver Dodge Ram truck, was later found at a mobile home park.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.