Before Tuesday, the last time a lawman died in a shooting in Kittias County, Washington was 1927.

But that 92-year stretch ended that night when an illegal alien opened fire on a county deputy and freshly sworn town policeman. The deputy died; the policeman landed in the hospital.

The illegal won’t kill anyone else. He’s dead, too.

Though a state or local sanctuary policy doesn’t seem to have played a role in the murder, the crime still highlights the problem with open borders. The murderer was in the country on a work visa. He was of the many illegals who “do the jobs Americans won’t do.”

But he decided not to leave. And so yet another American policeman has died at the hands of a miscreant — this one, Mexican — who shouldn’t have been in the country.

Road Rage, and the Shooting Begins

The Seattle Times reported that Flores Del Toro, the 29-year-old illegal-alien murderer, “was driving a car registered to someone else when someone reported he had been driving erratically Tuesday night.” Apparently, the owner of the car had permitted him to drive it.

“The initial call to the dispatch center was from someone ‘driving on the county road and reported this vehicle as acting erratically, driving around them, making them feel uncomfortable,’” the Times reported.

Police said Del Toro was “was exhibiting ‘road-rage’ behavior,” the newspaper reported.

The sheriff’s department dispatched Deputy Ryan Thompson, 42, to investigate the illegal-alien road-rager, and a young policeman, Benito Chaves, 22, joined him.

Thompson and Chaves chased Del Toro into Kittias, the Times reported, “through the four blocks that make up the center of town, then swerving a block west, a block north and a block east, ending up a trailer park. Fifteen minutes after the initial report, residents at the trailer park reported hearing gunshots and screaming.”

Del Toro hit both men. Thompson died at the hospital, and Chaves needed surgery for a broken femur.

Del Toro died in the hospital — a great savings for taxpayers who won’t have to finance a long trial and unending appeals from radical lawyers. Then again, maybe the American Civil Liberties Union will file a wrongful death lawsuit against Kittias County.

Thompson was married and had three children. A GoFundMe effort has raised almost $55,000 against a $10,000 goal to help the family.

Chaves graduated from police training in January, KIRO TV 7 reported. His wife is pregnant.

“Agricultural Worker”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement divulged that Del Toro overstayed a work visa — a common practice that suggests those who do never intended to leave and use the visa as a ruse to get into the country, then disappear.

ICE released a statement to KIRO:

Juan Manuel Flores Del Toro, a citizen of Mexico, was unlawfully present in the United States. He entered the U.S. on April 11, 2014 through a Laredo, Texas Land Port of Entry on a Temporary Agricultural Worker (H-2A) visa. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has no record of Flores Del Toro leaving the U.S., nor extending his visa after it expired.

The questions are whether Del Toro intended to leave the country once he got in to become a “temporary agricultural worker,” and what type of “agricultural work” the murderer actually did.

Police said they had “had limited contacts with him” — they were “nothing of real significance”: the authorities in New York freed him.

Whatever that means, police apparently didn’t know he was in the country illegally. Kittias County is not on the list of sanctuary cities and countries maintained by the Center for Immigration Studies.

Illegal aliens are a particularly significant threat to police, who frequently must stop them for drunk-driving and the other infractions that make illegals a major safety hazard behind the wheel.

On Christmas Eve, authorities in California allege, an illegal-alien gang-banger and habitual drunk driver murdered a policeman. Despite two drunk-driving convictions, the illegal was still in the country because of the state’s sanctuary laws. Those laws prohibit state and local police from cooperating with ICE to deport an illegal-alien even if his crimes are serious.

In February, authorities in New York freed, pursuant to a sanctuary law, an illegal-alien charged with third degree rape and did not notify ICE.

Another beneficiary of New York’s leftist sanctuary laws was a man who bit off the tip of an ICE agent's finger in early March. The struggle would not have occurred had police turned him over while he was in custody.

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