About five hours south of San Francisco, where Kate Steinle was murdered in broad daylight by an illegal immigrant, another illegal immigrant has been charged with raping and savagely beating an Air Force veteran to death with a hammer. According to police, Marilyn Pharis, 64, was sleeping in her Santa Maria, California home in the late morning — after having worked the night shift as a satellite tracker at nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base — when an illegal immigrant named Victor Aureliano Martinez and his accomplice Jose Fernando Villagomez broke into her house, raped her, strangled her, and bludgeoned her “mercilessly” with a hammer. She died eight days later.

The commander of the Air Force’s 50th Space Wing, where Pharis worked, called her death a “tragic loss.”