As cities grieve, calls urging action — and anger — persist
El Paso Democrats shun Trump’s visit as gun reform urged in Ohio
Some Democrats in Texas told President Donald Trump on Tuesday to stay away from El Paso, and Ohio’s Republican governor bucked his party to call for expanded gun laws as both states continued to reel from a pair of shootings that killed 31 people.
A racist screed remained the focus of police investigating the massacre at a Walmart store in El Paso, while the FBI opened an investigation into the mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, citing the gunman’s interest in violent ideology.
Trump was planning visits to both cities Wednesday, an announcement that stirred some resistance in El Paso.
Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso made clear that the president was not welcome in her hometown as it mourned. Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who was an El Paso congressman for six years, also said Trump should stay away.
Escobar tweeted that the White House had invited her to join Trump during his visit but she’ll instead attend a rally that organizers say will confront the president and white supremacy while calling for gun control.
Escobar said Tuesday that victims’ families were already using the city’s newly opened resource center where various government and mental health services have set up booths.
“There’s going to be a lot of trauma in our community; a lot of children saw things that no human being should see,” Escobar said.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway recounted visits Trump has made to grieving communities after mass
shootings in Parkland, Fla., and Las Vegas.
“He goes, trying to help heal communities, meeting with those who are injured, those loved ones who have survived, the innocents who have lost their lives so senselessly and tragically,” Conway said.
El Paso’s Republican mayor, Dee Margo, announced Trump’s visit at a news conference Monday evening, preemptively defending the decision to welcome the president while acknowledging there would be blowback: “I’m already getting the emails and the phone calls.”
Margo has previously criticized Trump for suggesting that El Paso, which had fewer homicides in all of 2017 than the death toll in Saturday’s attack, was a dangerous and unsafe place.
“This is not a political visit as he had before, and he is president of the United States,” Margo said, referring to a campaign rally Trump held in February. “So in that capacity, I will fulfill my obligations as mayor of El Paso to be with the president and discuss whatever our needs are in this community and hope that if we are expressing specifics, that we can get him to come through for us.”
Escobar and Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who was a congressman for six years, both said Trump wouldn’t be welcome in their hometown of El Paso.
“This president, who helped create the hatred that made Saturday’s tragedy possible, should not come to El Paso. We do not need more division. We need to heal. He has no place here,” O’Rourke tweeted.
El Paso authorities on Tuesday revealed the first details of how they arrested 21-year-old Patrick Crusius. El Paso police spokesman Sgt. Enrique Carrillo said Crusius was driving a a Honda Civic when he stopped, got out with hands raised and surrendered to a motorcycle officer, saying he was the shooter. Carrillo said it happened about a quarter mile from the Walmart.
On Monday, Crusius was assigned a veteran public defender from San Antonio, Mark Stevens. Stevens didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment left Tuesday.
A number of Houston FBI staff have deployed to El Paso to assist with the investigation of Saturday’s mass shooting, a spokeswoman said.
It is fairly standard that available and specialized units from all over the country are sent to aid in a big case, said Christina Garza, public information officer for the Houston FBI field office. Units from Albuquerque and Washington, D.C., are on site among others, she said.
The evidence response team is in El Paso helping to process and collect evidence.
In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine urged the GOP-led state Legislature to pass laws requiring background checks for nearly all gun sales and allowing courts to restrict firearms access for people perceived as threats.
Persuading the Legislature to pass such proposals could be an uphill battle. It has given little consideration this session to those and other gun-safety measures already introduced by Democrats and DeWine’s Republican predecessor, John Kasich, also unsuccessfully pushed for a so-called red flag law on restricting firearms for people considered threats.
“We can come together to do these things to save lives,” DeWine said.
Also Tuesday, the FBI opened an investigation into the Dayton shootings to try to determine what ideologies influenced 24-year-old gunman Connor Betts.
Special Agent Todd Wickerham, head of the FBI’s Cincinnati field office, said the agency is looking into who might have helped Betts and why he chose his target.
Wickerham didn’t say whether the FBI is looking at treating the case as domestic terrorism, as it did in the Texas mass shooting earlier in the weekend.
Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said Betts had “violent ideations that include mass shootings and had expressed a desire to commit a mass shooting.”
A woman who briefly dated the Ohio gunman said he suffered from bipolar disorder, joked about his dark thoughts and exhibited a fascination with mass shootings.
Adelia Johnson wrote in an online essay that Betts showed her a video of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on their first date.
“When he started joking about his dark thoughts, I understood,” she wrote. “Dark thoughts for someone with a mental illness are just a symptom that we have to learn how to manage.”
She said Betts expressed “uncontrollable urges” that she called “red flags,” which eventually led her to call things off in May.
It’s unknown whether any of the Dayton victims were targeted . Besides Betts’ sister Megan, 22, the others who died were Monica Brickhouse, 39; Nicholas Cumer, 25; Derrick Fudge, 57; Thomas McNichols, 25; Lois Oglesby, 27; Saeed Saleh, 38; Logan Turner, 30; and Beatrice N. Warren-Curtis, 36.
Betts was white and six of the nine killed were black, but police said the speed of the rampage made any discrimination in the shooting seem unlikely.