Patrick Crusius condemned a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and opened fire at a Walmart supermarket with a semi-automatic rifle. He now faces the death penalty in a Texas court.
Published on 07/07/2023 22:02
Reading time: 1 min
Patrick Crusius, perpetrator of the 2019 El Paso shootings, attends a prosecution hearing in El Paso, Texas on October 10, 2019. (MARK LAMBIE/AP/SIPA)
In 2019, he killed 23 people at a Texas grocery store popular with El Paso’s Hispanic community. A young American white supremacist was sentenced to 90 consecutive life sentences by a federal court on Friday, July 7. Patrick Crusius, 24, had pleaded guilty to 90 charges, including “racist crimes resulting in death”. He still faces a lawsuit in the Texas state judiciary, which includes seeking the death penalty against him.
Prior to his massacre, Patrick Crusius posted a white supremacist document online denouncing a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” He then drove about ten hours from the Dallas suburbs, where he lived, to El Paso, a predominantly Hispanic city, where he opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at a Walmart hypermarket. When police arrived, he got out of a vehicle with his hands up and claimed to be the shooter. In police custody, he admitted wanting to attack “Mexicans”.
The massacre killed 23 people, including eight Mexican nationals and the majority Hispanic Americans. It had deeply shocked the United States and opened a debate about responsibility for Republican President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant diatribes. The El Paso Massacre remains one of the deadliest homicides in United States history, but is regularly riddled with shootings.
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