Family of Rancher Killed Wants Border Security

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Family of Rancher Killed Wants Border Security
Krentz Family Asking for Stronger Border Security
Updated: Monday, 05 Apr 2010, 5:52 AM MDT
Published : Sunday, 04 Apr 2010, 11:12 AM MDT
PHOENIX (AP) - The family of a rancher who was shot and killed on his land in southeastern Arizona is hoping his death will bring better security along the border with Mexico.
Robert Krentz was killed March 25. Some Arizona officials say he was likely a victim of Mexico-based drug traffickers, but Cochise County investigators say they don't have a motive or suspects. In a statement released Saturday, Krentz's family urged the U.S. government to "immediately order deployment of the active U.S. military" to the border.
Arizona's ranching community has been asking for increased border security for years, an issue that's now getting the attention they say it deserves. New Mexico ordered more National Guardsmen to the border to beef up surveillance in the wake of the rancher's death.
Statement from the Krentz Family:
"On March 27th, our Husband, Father, Grandfather, Brother and Uncle was murdered in cold blood by a suspected illegal alien on the Ranch.
This senseless act took the life of a man, a humanitarian, who bore no ill will towards anyone. Rob loved his family instilling in them the importance of honesty, fair dealing and skill managing all aspects of a large 100 year old ranching operation producing food to make our Country strong and healthy.
He was known for his concern and kindness helping neighbors, friends and even trespassers on his ranch with compassionate assistance in their time of need.
We hold no malice towards the Mexican people for this senseless act but do hold the political forces in this country and Mexico accountable for what has happened. Their disregard of our repeated pleas and warnings of impending violence towards our community fell on deaf ears shrouded in political correctness. As a result, we have paid the ultimate price for their negligence in credibly securing our Borderlands.
In honor of everything Rob stood for, we ask everyone to work peacefully towards bringing credible law and order to our Border and provide Border Patrol and County Law Enforcement with sufficient financial resources and manpower to stop this invasion of our country.
We urge the President of the United States to step forward and immediately order deployment of the active U.S. military to the Arizona, New Mexico Border
Thank you for all for honoring Rob. We want the truth known."
http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news/local/family-of-rancher-killed-wants-border-security

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Border Fence Under Renewed Fire After Rancher Killing
The killing of Arizona rancher Robert Krentz allegedly by an illegal immigrant has some critics pointing out that hundreds of miles of U.S.-Mexico border fencing isn't even high enough to stop a person on foot.
Of the 646 miles of barriers currently constructed along the 2,000-mile southern border of the United States, 300 miles are vehicle barriers, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That means they're meant to keep out cars and trucks, but aren't high enough to keep out people crossing the border illegally on foot.
Fencing in place just south of the Krentz family ranch in southeastern Arizona is exactly that kind of vehicle barrier, plus there's a sizable gap in the fence nearby.
Residents and officials say the security barrier is simply ineffective, and that the killing last month is shining a light on the problem.
Rancher Wendy Glenn, Krentz's longtime friend and neighbor who heard the man's last radio transmission to his brother, said she has roughly 4 miles of border fence along Malpai Ranch. The "wildlife-friendly" barrier -- one that allows large animals and determined people to pass through freely -- ranges from large Normandy-style "X" crosses to standard posts and rails, topping off at no more than six feet high, she said.
"It doesn't keep any people out," Glenn told FoxNews.com on Monday. "We don't want any more fence here. We want more people on the border. No matter what they put in, they're going to tunnel under, cut through, or use ladders. We don't need that."
Glenn characterized the border fence as a "big waste of money" and called for increased federal presence along the remote areas, as well increased communication among law enforcement agencies.
"We need more people on the border," she said. "And we need more horse patrols -- they are awesome."
Jenny Burke, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said 646 of approximately 670 miles of pedestrian and vehicle border fencing has been constructed as of March 26. Just six miles of fencing infrastructure remains to be completed along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, Burke said.
The roughly 1,350 miles that will not be protected by a border fence of any kind will be patrolled by border agents, other infrastructure or technology, Burke said, or a combination of all three.
Pedestrian fencing used along the border is determined by the geography and have several variations, including steel picket-style fences set in concrete, blockades similar to those found around federal buildings and concrete walls with steel mesh. Vehicle fences, meanwhile, are about 6 feet tall and are typically large Normandy-style crosses.
"And they're all welded together," she said. "So they're impossible to move."
Burke said areas selected for physical fences are locations where illegal immigrants could easily blend in with local surroundings if those individuals successfully crossed the border.
During a tour of the border along Fort Hancock, Texas, last week, Border Patrol Agent Joe Romero said security in the area was improving despite rising fears in the community that drug cartel-related violence in El Porvenir, Mexico, could spill over into the U.S. town at any moment. Still, threats remain, he said.
"At no point am I going to indicate that we have full control of the border, or that we're 100 percent secure on the border," Romero told FoxNews.com. "It's still a struggle, there's still some work to be done. But we've made huge strides."
Romero, one of about 2,600 U.S. Border Patrol agents scouring the 125,000-square mile El Paso sector, extending from Fort Hancock to the New Mexico-Arizona state line, said apprehensions in the area have fallen approximately tenfold in the last four years, from roughly 122,000 in fiscal year 2006 to about 15,000 last year.
The border fence in Fort Hancock roughly 50 miles southeast from Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of Mexico's ongoing drug war, stands about 20 feet tall in some areas and is entirely absent in others. And along some stretches of land between Fort Hancock and Tornillo, Texas, the nearest town, all that separates the U.S. and Mexico is the ankle-deep Rio Grande River.
Despite its perception as a cure-all blockade, Romero said the border fence is meant to deter large groups of illegal immigrants from entering the country illegally. It's also meant to slow down any would-be border-crossers, giving crucial seconds to roving border patrols in trucks, all-terrain vehicles and on horseback.
Former Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, whose touchstone issue is illegal immigration, told FoxNews.com the federal government needs to ideally have a "layered" fence along with National Guard patrol along the entire southern border. A layered fence is a barrier that includes a fence, a road and another fence.
But he said the hundreds of miles of fencing along the border now are not effective.
"That's what's so maddening," Tancredo said.
"It doesn't stop people," said Charles Heatherly, executive director of Tancredo’s Rocky Mountain Foundation. "It's a lie."
Heatherly said in an e-mail to FoxNews.com that the kind of fence by Krentz's home is incapable of stopping "drug smugglers like the one who killed Rob Krentz."
It's unclear who killed Krentz, but local authorities said they suspected an illegal immigrant since footprints near the scene of the crime led back to the Mexican border.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/04/05/border-fence-renewed-rancher-killing/

Ranchers Alarmed by Killing Near Border
DOUGLAS, Ariz. — Sooner or later, they all feared, one of them would be killed. The ranchers, retirees and others who prefer to live off the grid in the vast desert near the Mexican border regularly confront the desperate and dehydrated illegal border crossers, who knock on their doors for directions and water, and lately more of the less innocent, who scurry across their land or lie low in the brush, stooped with marijuana and other drugs bundled on their backs.
Now, according to the leading police theory, the inevitable has occurred, whipping up a political storm and sending a shiver through a community not easily shaken.
Robert N. Krentz Jr., 58, the scion of one of the best-known and oldest ranching families here in southeast Arizona, was found shot to death March 27 on his vast, remote ranch north of here after radioing to his brother that he was aiding someone he believed to be an illegal immigrant.
Mr. Krentz went missing shortly after that call, and the police found his body several hours later in his all-terrain vehicle, his guns untouched in the back, his dog shot and critically wounded. Fresh footprints led from the scene to the Mexican border 20 miles away.
Given Mr. Krentz’s radio transmission, the footprints and heavy drug and illegal immigrant trafficking in that area, investigators are working on the assumption that he encountered a smuggler, possibly heading back to Mexico.
“You never know who you’re dealing with out here because you get all kinds of traffic through here,” said William McDonald, a fellow rancher on the vast mesquite scrubland pocked with canyons and scattered mountain ranges floating on the horizon like islands.
Mr. McDonald and other residents said that in the last year or two the traffic had taken a more sinister turn, with larger numbers of drug smugglers, many clad in black and led by armed scouts.
“It was only a matter of time,” he said. “Everything was in place for something like this to happen.”
Sheriff Larry A. Dever of Cochise County said if it was related to smuggling, it would be the first such killing of a rancher in more than three decades. But as local, state and federal investigators pore over the case, no motive has been ruled out, Sheriff Dever said.
Mr. Krentz’s family, in a statement last week, said they had little doubt that the killing was related to smuggling. They went on to vent frustration at what they said was a lack of concern by federal leaders.
“We hold no malice towards the Mexican people for this senseless act but do hold the political forces in this country and Mexico accountable for what has happened,” the family said. “Their disregard of our repeated pleas and warnings of impending violence towards our community fell on deaf ears shrouded in political correctness. As a result, we have paid the ultimate price for their negligence in credibly securing our borderlands.”
Arizona, where the border authorities arrest more people and seize more drugs than in any other state, has long been a flashpoint for the immigration debate, and ranchers as a whole have been in the thick of it. Some have allowed armed civilian patrol groups to use their property to help catch border crossers.
The mere possibility that a rancher died at the hands of a smuggler led a host of politicians facing election challenges this year — including Senator John McCain and Gov. Jan Brewer, both Republicans, as well as Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat who represents the area — to quickly condemn the killing and to call for tighter border enforcement.
They demanded, among other things, that the federal government post National Guard troops on the border, a move that Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico made on his own last week, ordering his state Guard commander to send an untold number of troops there to help keep watch.
Although as Arizona governor she supported a limited Guard deployment on the border and pleaded with the Bush administration to keep them there when the temporary deployment was up in 2008, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has not backed the idea now.
Instead, the department said it had increased its own resources at the border in the last year and had offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Mr. Krentz’s killer.
“We are carefully monitoring the situation, and will continue to ensure that we are doing everything necessary to keep communities along the Southwest border safe,” a spokesman, Matthew Chandler, said in a statement.
Such assurances get a skeptical greetings here, where everybody has a story about an encounter with immigrants or smugglers.
The parched man who still waited for the rancher to come home before using his water tap. The group of smugglers using a catapult to fling marijuana bundles over the fence. The community clean-up that yielded two pickup truck loads of burlap from smugglers who had unbundled marijuana packages. And more recently, the series of break-ins and thefts.
Residents said they believed that the completion of a segment of the border wall near Douglas shifted smuggling traffic farther east in the last couple of years to more remote, rugged areas along the New Mexico border.
The area is guarded by two divisions of the Border Patrol who use different types of radios and have had trouble communicating with each other, officials at the agency have acknowledged. In addition, ranchers said, many of the agents are newly hired and unfamiliar with the area, slowing response times.
While some believe that the border wall completed in the last few years has slowed down large groups, many others have little faith in it.
Bill Odle, who lives about 400 feet from the border, drove along the fence last week, pointing out spots where smugglers have cut it and scaled it, sometimes bringing ladders to speed their way.
“It doesn’t work in stopping people, but it does stop wildlife,” Mr. Odle said.
But another rancher, Richard Hodges, who said he had received threats from smugglers for reporting them to the Border Patrol, believes that the fence does at least slow down traffic, particularly the large groups.
Mr. Hodges once let a civilian patrol group erect a fence near the border on his property, but the group, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps recently disbanded and the fence is being taken down.
By all accounts, Mr. Krentz never got caught up in border politics. A bear of a man with a reserved nature, he could seem imposing at first glance but almost always rendered help to those who needed it, friends and family said. He inherited the 35,000-acre ranch from his father — it has been in the family since 1907 — and in 2008 it was inducted into the Arizona Farming and Ranching Hall of Fame.
“He was a typical ranch kid,” said Wendy Glenn, a neighbor and longtime friend who said she heard Mr. Krentz’s last transmission on her radio.
Now, like others, Ms. Glenn said she planned to be more cautious. “Usually if somebody needs help, you walk up to them and help them,” she said. “We won’t just walk up and offer help anymore.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/us/05arizona.html?partner=TOPIXNEWS&ei=5099

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Official: Suspect in ranch death recently in U.S.
A law enforcement official said Monday a man suspected of fatally shooting a cattle rancher near the Arizona-Mexico border was a Mexican who was recently in the United States.
Some politicians have said the attack is evidence that border security must be strengthened.
Deputy wounded in desert shootout found
The official said it's not known if the suspect was still in the U.S. and noted the person who killed rancher Robert Krentz more than a month ago wasn't believed to be a U.S. citizen.
The person works for an agency that isn't leading the investigation and requested anonymity.
Carol Capas, spokeswoman for the Cochise County Sheriff's Office, which is leading the investigation, declined to confirm the account.
Krentz was on his all-terrain vehicle checking water lines and fencing when he was shot March 27 on his 35,000-acre ranch northeast of Douglas, Ariz. The wounded rancher managed to speed away before he lost consciousness and died.
At a congressional hearing last month, Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever said the rancher was believed to have been killed by an illegal immigrant who was headed to Mexico and worked as a scout for drug smugglers.
Scouts generally serve as mountaintop lookouts for drug smugglers, instructing the drivers for smuggling rings to pull over and hide when authorities are nearby.
Arizona passed a new law last month requiring local and state law enforcement officers to question people about their immigration status if there's reason to suspect they're in the country illegally.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/153250