An Illegal Alien Shot This Man's Son Dead. Now He Hopes to Spare Other Parents His Grief.

Steve Ronnebeck with his children, including Grant at right, in an undated photo. 

An Arizona man whose son was shot and killed by an illegal

immigrant says he doesn’t want another parent to experience the loss he still feels nearly five years later.

“It’s devastating,” Steve Ronnebeck, who lives in Phoenix, says in an interview about the loss of his son Grant, who was killed at age 21 by an illegal immigrant over a pack of cigarettes.

On Jan. 22, 2015, Grant was working the overnight shift at a QuikTrip gas station in Mesa, Arizona, two hours and 56 minutes from the border city of Nogales in northern Mexico.

Ronnebeck says an illegal alien from Mexico, identified as Apolinar Altamirano, came in at 3:45 a.m., asked for cigarettes, and dumped out a jar of change on the counter.

Grant started to count the change, but apparently not fast enough, according to a police report.

Altamirano, then 29, asked why he wasn’t giving him cigarettes, and Grant replied that he had to count the change.

Altamirano then pulled a gun, and Grant offered him a pack of cigarettes “right away,” Ronnebeck says.

“This man at that point shot Grant point-blank in the face, killing him instantly,” Ronnebeck tells The Daily Signal, citing video camera footage. “He then stepped over Grant’s body, grabbed a couple more packs of cigarettes, and walked out the door.”

His son’s murder, he says, spurred him to speak out on the threat that unrestrained illegal immigration poses to America.

Today, Ronnebeck, 52, is on the advisory board of WeBuildTheWall.us, a citizens organization working to raise awareness as well as funds for a wall along the southern border.

“I definitely have learned that I need to fight, not just for him, [but] for other people. I’m not looking to be famous,” Ronnebeck tells The Daily Signal. “I just don’t want this to happen to anybody else. And he gave me that purpose in my life.”

Ronnebeck has two other children: a daughter, now 28, and a younger son, now 19. He laments that Grant’s life ended before it truly began:

He was just starting his life. He had dreams, he had plans. You don’t really realize all the things that you miss until you start missing them. Christmas, the holidays, they’re terrible.

It seems like there’s this four-month period where it starts at about Thanksgiving and then you have Christmas, and then you have...

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