Suspect in El Paso massacre ‘didn’t hold anything back’ in interrogation
The suspect in the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, “didn’t hold anything back” when he was interviewed by investigators, the city’s police chief said Sunday.
Greg Allen also said “it’s beginning to look more solidly” that the suspected gunman was the author of a manifesto, posted to the website 8chan about an hour and a half before the rampage began, that warns of an “invasion” of Latino immigrants and expresses support for the man who killed worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.
Although authorities still have not formally identified the suspect, his name has been widely reported as Patrick Crusius, 21. El Paso jail records show a Patrick Crusius was booked Sunday on state charges of capital murder.
Allen did not elaborate on what the suspect told authorities.
Jaime Esparza, the El Paso district attorney, said he will seek the death penalty for the state murder charges. John F. Bash, the U.S. attorney for the western district of Texas, said he is considering bringing federal hate crime and firearms charges. Bash said he is treating the attack as an act of domestic terrorism.
“It appears to be designed to intimidate a civilian population, to say the least,” he said.
The online manifesto was posted to 8chan, a message board popular on the far right, by an anonymous user who uploaded another document under the file name “P. – Crusius.” That file was taken down, and it was not clear what it contained. A Twitter account that appeared to belong to Crusius was shut down Saturday evening. Tweets on the account had praised President Donald Trump and, in particular, his effort to build a wall along the U.s-mexico border.
Television coverage Saturday showed police swarming a house identified as that of Crusius in Allen, a mostly white suburb of Dallas about 650 miles east of El Paso.
Crusius graduated from Plano Senior High School in 2017 and attended Collin College, a community college in nearby Mckinney, from fall 2017 to spring 2019, the college said in a statement.
Local police said they’d seen no indications in the past that Crusius might undertake the type of crimes that the suspect in El Paso is accused of committing. He was reported as a runaway at 16, but the person who reported him missing called back 30 minutes later to say he’d returned home, according to Allen Sgt. Jon Felty.