The shooting that killed 20 people at a crowded El Paso department store is to be handled as a domestic terrorism case, federal authorities said as they weighed hate-crime charges against the suspected gunman that could carry the death penalty.
A local prosecutor on Sunday announced that he would file capital murder charges, declaring that the alleged assailant had “lost the right to be among us.”
The attack on Saturday was followed less than a day later by another shooting that claimed nine lives in a nightlife district of Dayton, Ohio. That shooter was killed by police.
Photo: AFP
Together the two assaults wounded more than 50 people, some of them critically, and shocked even a nation that has grown accustomed to regular spasms of gun violence.
Investigators focused on whether the El Paso attack was a hate crime after the emergence of a racist, anti-immigrant creed that was posted online shortly beforehand.
Detectives sought to determine if it was written by the man who was arrested.
The border city has figured prominently in the immigration debate and is home to 680,000 people, most of them Latino.
Using a rifle, the El Paso gunman opened fire on shoppers during the busy back-to-school season.
The attack targeted a Walmart and did not spread to other nearby shopping areas, El Paso Police Sergeant Robert Gomez said.
Most victims were inside the store.
By Sunday evening, all bodies had been removed from the store and the parking lot, police said.
They did not release names or ages, although some families announced that loved ones had been killed.
Despite initial reports of possible multiple shooters, the man in custody was believed to be the only gunman, police said.
Law enforcement officials identified him as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius from Allen, a Dallas suburb, which is nearly a 10-hour drive from El Paso.
Crusius was arrested without police firing any shots and was jailed without bond, authorities said.
The suspect was cooperative and “forthcoming with information,” El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said.
Police said that they did not know where the weapon was purchased.
Allen acknowledged that it is legal under Texas law to carry a long gun openly in a public place.
“Of course, normal individuals seeing that type of weapon might be alarmed,” but before he began firing, the suspect was technically “within the realm of the law,” Allen said.
Relatives said that a 25-year-old woman who was shot while apparently trying to shield her two-month-old son was among those killed, as was her husband.
Mexican officials said that six Mexican nationals were also among the dead.
Authorities searched for any links between the suspect and the material in the document that was posted online, including the writer’s expression of concern that an influx of Hispanics into the US will replace aging white voters, potentially turning Texas blue in elections and swinging the White House to the US Democrats.
The first sentence of the four-page document expresses support for the man accused of killing 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in March after posting his own creed with a conspiracy theory about nonwhite migrants replacing whites.
“It’s not what we’re about,” El Paso Mayor Dee Margo said at the news conference.
El Paso County is more than 80 percent Latino, according to the latest census data. Tens of thousands of Mexicans legally cross the border each day to work and shop in the city.
Former US representative Beto O’Rourke, who is from El Paso, said that border walls have not made his hometown safer.
The city’s murder rate was less than half the national average in 2005, the year before the start of its border fence. Before the wall project started, El Paso had been rated one of the three safest major US cities going back to 1997.
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