Just one day after Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Nichelle Holmes released criminal illegal alien Marcos Iriarte-Valdez from jail, he allegedly stabbed a Martinez, California, resident to death during a botched burglary.
Todd Stewart, a 68-year-old retiree, was working in his garage on Aug. 6 when he noticed a burglary in progress at the home next door. Stewart reportedly confronted the burglar, an encounter that ultimately ended with his brutal murder on his own front lawn.
The grisly attack was captured by a neighbor’s surveillance camera.
Iriarte-Valdez, a 36-year-old Venezuelan national, was arrested the following day at his Martinez home.
According to a Department of Homeland Security statement, Iriarte-Valdez was charged with suspicion of murder. The statement listed additional charges against him: “inflicting corporal injury on spouse, three counts of burglary, receiving known stolen property, trespassing, entering non-commercial dwelling, loitering, as well as convicted of violation of court ordered protective order.”
The New York Post reported that Iriarte-Valdez has a lengthy rap sheet that includes an October 2025 arrest “for a DUI and a hit-and-run causing property damage.”
According to Fox News:
Marcos Iriarte-Valdez had a prior criminal record and was facing burglary charges stemming from at least two incidents elsewhere in Contra Costa County, just east of San Francisco, when a judge in the Democratic-majority county ordered him released.
The Department of Homeland Security told Fox News Digital it placed an immigration detainer on Iriarte-Valdez Sept. 23, 2025. The DHS said that Valdez was from Venezuela with citizenship in Spain.
The suspect was arrested in April for two home burglaries that occurred in Orinda. He was on pretrial release for those crimes and placed on home monitoring.
Iriarte-Valdez was arrested on Aug. 4 for “allegedly violating the terms of his home detention monitoring as it pertains to the Orinda case.”
On Aug. 5, he was released by Judge Holmes on his own recognizance and referred back to home detention monitoring.
Unfortunately, as Martinez Police Chief Andrew White told the Post, authorities did not fit Iriarte-Valdez with an ankle monitor until Aug. 7, the day after Stewart was killed. So, without the monitor in place on Aug. 6, he was free to go wherever he pleased and do whatever he wanted to do.
He was arrested at his home on the evening of Aug. 7.
White said police were able to identify the suspect using surveillance footage and automated license-plate recognition technology. “Simultaneously,” he said, “we were receiving tips from the community from people who recognized the vehicle.”
Neighbors were understandably shaken by the murder.
“I’m still processing because I still expect to see him over the fence,” neighbor Galina Pasternak told KTVU. “It’s nowhere as bad as his family, because they lost their father, his wife lost her husband. They finally were spending more time together because they were retired. They were traveling.”
DHS issued a statement demanding that Gov. Gavin Newsom turn the suspect over to federal authorities.
California’s sanctuary-state law bars local police from honoring ICE detainers.
Todd Stewart’s needless death is a tragic consequence of sanctuary city and state policies — and he is far from the only victim whose life might have been spared had these misguided laws not prevented immigration authorities from intervening.
Nor was Stewart’s death a random tragedy. Iriarte-Valdez had a lengthy criminal record, was facing burglary and other charges, had allegedly violated the terms of his home detention, and was already the subject of an immigration detainer. Yet he was not turned over to federal immigration authorities. Instead, he was released from jail because of California’s sanctuary policies.
And one day later, Stewart was dead.
That is the terrible human cost of policies that repeatedly put the interests of criminal illegal aliens ahead of public safety. Stewart’s family will live with that cost forever. And sadly, theirs is far from the first American family to discover just how deadly those consequences can be.
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