Shots kill 20 people in Texas border city
Police arrest suspect, scrutinize manifesto
EL PASO, Texas — Twenty people were killed and more than two dozen were injured in a shooting Saturday in a busy shopping area in the Texas border city of El Paso, the state’s governor said.
Most of the victims were believed to have been shot at a Walmart store near the Cielo Vista Mall, officials said, adding that the store was packed with as many as 3,000 people during the busy backto-school shopping season.
El Paso police Sgt. Robert Gomez said the gunman used a rifle, and a suspect was taken into custody without incident.
Gov. Greg Abbott called the shooting “one of the most deadly days in the history of Texas.”
Two law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity identified the suspect as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius.
El Paso police had not released the suspect’s name by late Saturday, but they confirmed that the suspected gunman is from Allen, Texas, near Dallas.
Police said 26 people were
injured in the shooting, and most of them were being treated at area hospitals.
“The scene was a horrific one,” said El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen, who added that many of the wounded had life-threatening injuries. He said police had found an anti-immigrant manifesto that may have been written by the gunman and posted online.
“Right now we have a manifesto from this individual that indicates, to some degree, it has a nexus to potential hate crime,” Allen said.
El Paso, which has about 680,000 residents, is in west Texas and sits across the border from Juarez, Mexico.
Residents were volunteering Saturday afternoon to give blood to help the injured, while police and military members were helping people who were looking for missing loved ones.
“It’s chaos right now,” Austin Johnson said Saturday afternoon. Johnson, an Army medic at nearby Fort Bliss, was volunteering to help at the shopping center and later at the school that was serving as a reunification center.
Shortly after the shooting, there were conflicting reports about the number of gunmen. El Paso’s mayor said at one point that there were three gunmen, but police later said they believed there was only one. They were continuing to investigate reports that others were involved, however.
Ryan Mielke, a spokesman for University Medical Center of El Paso, said the hospital treated 13 people who were hurt in the gunfire, including one who died. Two of the injured were children who were being transferred to El Paso Children’s Hospital, he said. He declined to provide additional details about the victims.
Eleven victims were being treated at Del Sol Medical Center, according to hospital spokesman Victor Guerrero. He said those victims’ ages ranged from 35 to 82.
WITNESS ACCOUNTS
Vanessa Saenz, a 37-yearold El Paso resident, was turning into the Walmart parking lot with her mother and son to buy the family’s weekly groceries when she heard a few pops that sounded like fireworks.
She looked over and saw a man who seemed to be “dancing” in the air, she said, and then she noticed a woman sprinting.
At that point, she realized that the man she thought was dancing had been shot.
“My mom yelled, ‘Just go! Speed and just go!’ but of course there were people trying to dodge the bullets and running through the parking lot,” Saenz said.
She said she caught a glimpse of the shooter, who was wearing dark cargo pants, a black T-shirt and some sort of earmuffs. He was around 5-foot-10-inches tall, thin and carrying a rifle, she said.
He was just “shooting randomly,” Saenz said, and then he walked into the store and she lost sight of him.
Inside the Walmart, shoppers and employees raced to exit the building and hide among the store’s shelves.
Adriana Quezada, 39, said she was in the women’s clothing section of Walmart with her two children when the shooting started.
“I heard the shots, but I thought they were hits, like roof construction,” she said.
Her 19-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son threw themselves to the ground, then later fled the store through an emergency exit. They were not hurt, Quezada said.
She said she saw four men, dressed in black, moving together firing guns indiscriminately.
“We heard shots and saw smoke,” said Victor Gamboa, 18, who works at the McDonald’s restaurant inside the Walmart. “I saw a man on the floor full of blood. He appeared to be dead. It happened very quickly.”
Gamboa said he and other McDonald’s workers sheltered customers to keep them safe and huddled on the floor for 15 minutes. Police officers eventually arrived and escorted the group out to a Sam’s Club store across the street.
Manuel Uruchurtu, 20, had just paid at a Walmart cash register at 11:36 a.m. (CDT) and was walking out through the store doors when he heard the shots. As he fled the store with a crowd of other people, he saw two bodies on the ground outside, one surrounded by blood, he said.
“I saw people crying: children, old people, all in shock,” Uruchurtu said.
Witnesses said some people used their own cars to transport victims to hospitals.
OFFICIALS’ REACTION
Abbott, who confirmed the number of victims during a news conference, Saturday called the shooting “a heinous and senseless act of violence” and said the state had deployed numerous law enforcement officers to the city.
President Donald Trump tweeted that the “reports are very bad, many killed,” adding that he had spoken to Abbott to “pledge total support of Federal Government.”
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said three Mexicans were among the people slain, and Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said six Mexicans were wounded.
Lopez Obrador tweeted Saturday that he sends “condolences to the families of the victims, both American and Mexican.”
Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic presidential candidate who represented El Paso in Congress for years, canceled his campaign events in Nevada and California to return to the city.
On Saturday, speaking at a Las Vegas candidates’ forum before he left for El Paso, O’Rourke teared up as he told the audience: “There is a lot of injury and suffering in El Paso right now. El Paso is the strongest place in the world. I’m going to be with my family and be with my hometown.”
O’Rourke, who said he had called his wife before taking the stage, said the shooting shatters “any illusion that we have that progress is inevitable” on tackling gun violence.
“We have to find some reason for optimism and hope or else we consign ourselves to a future where nearly 40,000 people a year will lose their lives to gun violence, and I cannot accept that,” O’Rourke said.
Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said the El Paso shooting suspect wasn’t on her group’s radar before the shooting. “We had nothing in our files on him,” she wrote in an email. “Scary how young these shooters have been.”
This is the 21st mass killing in the United States this year, and the fifth public mass shooting. Before Saturday, 96 people had died in mass killings in 2019 — 26 of them in public mass shootings.
The AP/USATODAY/ Northeastern University mass murder database tracks all U.S. homicides since 2006 involving four or more people, not including the offender, regardless of weapon, location, victim-offender relationship or motive.
The database shows that the median age of a public mass shooter is 28, significantly lower than the median age of a person who commits a mass shooting of family members. Since 2006, 11 mass shootings — not including Saturday’s — were committed by men who are 21 or younger, the database shows.
Law enforcement officials were studying the anti-immigrant manifesto Saturday to determine if it was written by the El Paso suspect, according to an El Paso law enforcement official who had been briefed on the investigation.
The manifesto reportedly expresses racially extremist views, meaning the case could be designated as a federal hate crime or an act of domestic terrorism if officials determine that the manifesto is tied to the shooting.
Information for this article was contributed by Cedar Attanasio, Michael Balsamo, Diana Heidgerd, Martha Irvine, Eric Tucker, Michelle L. Price and staff members of The Associated Press; by Arturo Rubio, Manny Fernandez and Mariel Padilla of The New York Times; and by Hannah Knowles, Morgan Krakow, Michael S. Rosenwald, Devlin Barrett, Mark Berman and Hannah Natanson of The Washington Post.