March 15, 2019
Last spring, his dog chewed up a neighbor’s Chihuahua to the extent of $800 in veterinary bills. He was called before the Police Vicious and Dangerous Dog Unit for a hearing, but did not appear. Instead, his wife came. Ross took a media beating for that, but his wife said her name is on all the paperwork.
Ross and his wife, Eliana Lopez, are still married, seven years after his citation for spousal abuse just days before he was inaugurated as sheriff, forcing him to spend time in the jail that the sheriff supervises. He was cited after a neighbor taped Eliana’s tearful complaint about how they argued and Ross grabbed her arm and bruised her. But she has stuck with him ever since and played down the argument as nothing but a brief spat.
The incident hung over Mirkarimi like a dark cloud all through his tenure as sheriff. And added to that were other scandals: the suspension of the sheriff’s driver’s license for failing to report an accident; the death of a woman in a the stairwell of a hospital the sheriff’s deputies were supposed to guard; his failure to discipline deputies who set up fights by prisoners; and the murder of a tourist by an illegal alien freed from the jail without immigration officers being told he was going out on the streets again.
Mirkarimi didn’t stand a chance after that and badly lost the 2015 primary.
After leaving office, he founded a consulting firm, RMir Pro Civicus, which has gotten attention working for Uruguay on legalizing medical marijuana—a topic long close to the heart of a man noted for politics on the far left of far left San Francisco.
His wife has also been performing her one-woman play, “What is the Scandal?” about the family domestic abuse scandal.
And Ross is spending time fighting off a suit filed by the parents of the woman murdered by the illegal immigrant, who say he is personally responsible for her death because he let the man go free.
Mirkarimi is the son of Russian-American woman and an Iranian immigrant. But the couple divorced when Mirkarimi was five and he was raised by his mother, rarely seeing his father.