Illegal immigrant allegedly driving drunk, crashes car and kills police officer

An illegal immigrant has been accused of driving intoxicated and causing a crash that killed St. Louis police officer David Lee on Sunday morning.

St. Louis Police Chief Robert Tracy said police responded to a one-vehicle crash on eastbound Interstate 70 near Grand Boulevard around 8:30 a.m.

Tracy said Lee, 44, was getting traffic cones from his trunk when Ramon Arnaldo Chavez-Rodriguez, 24, lost control of his car and hit Lee.

Chavez-Rodriguez was operating his vehicle at 71 mph in a 55 mph zone and had a blood alcohol content of .10, above the .08 legal limit, court documents showed. 

According to local news reports, Chavez-Rodriguez pled “guilty to driving drunk and second-degree assault in connection with an incident in 2020, where he physically abused a woman and attempted to hit her with his car."

St. Charles County Prosecutor Joe McCulloch said federal immigration authorities have been alerted about Chavez-Rodriguez as a suspect in another crime.

"Homeland security was notified that he was arrested, that he was charged, and he was in this country illegally. Their answer is they’re not going to issue a detainer—and a detainer is something that would tell us to hold him until they could get him—but they weren’t going to do that, because he’d already been in the system back in 2020 when this incident occurred," McCulloch said, according to a Fox 2 report.