Texas suspect targeted Latinos, authorities say
EL PASO, Texas — The suspect accused of killing 22 people at an El Paso Walmart told authorities that he was targeting “Mexicans” and confessed to carrying out the shooting rampage when he surrendered to authorities, according to police.
Law enforcement officials responding to the scene Aug. 3 spotted a car stopped at an intersection not far from the Walmart, an El Paso police detective wrote in an arrest warrant affidavit. They then saw a man — identified as Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old charged with capital murder in the case — get out of the car with his hands in the air, the affidavit said.
He told them, “I’m the shooter,” Detective Adrian Garcia said in the affidavit, which was filed to a judge Sunday, the day after the shooting.
Authorities believe Crusius was the author of a statement posted online shortly before the attack that decried what it called a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Federal officials have called the attack, which also injured dozens of people, domestic terrorism and said they are weighing federal hate crimes charges in the case.
The El Paso rampage was one of two mass shootings to occur within a day. Just hours later, a gunman in Dayton, Ohio, killed nine people before police officers shot and killed him.
Crusius has been in jail since surrendering. Authorities say he has been cooperative and has answered their questions.
Greg Allen, the El Paso police chief, said the suspected attacker seemed to be “in a state of shock and confusion” and has not shown any remorse to the investigators.
According to Garcia’s affidavit, Crusius waived his right to an attorney and agreed to speak, telling police he traveled from Allen, a suburb of Dallas, with an assault rifle and multiple magazines. Authorities said Allen is more than 10 hours away by car from the largely Latino border city of El Paso.
“The defendant stated once inside the store he opened fire using his AK-47 shooting multiple innocent victims,” Garcia wrote. The detective added that Crusius said his targets were “Mexicans.”
The car he emerged from last Saturday was about a half-mile from the Walmart, stopped on a street that essentially divides shopping areas from residential areas.
Garcia wrote that Texas Rangers heading to the shooting saw the vehicle stopped in a left-turn lane. It was unclear where Crusius was heading, though Allen has suggested that he did not know the area well and got lost in a neighborhood upon arriving.
An attorney for Crusius did not respond to a request for comment about the affidavit.
Chris Ayres, an attorney for the Crusius family, told The Associated Press that the rest of the family never heard Patrick Crusius use the kind of racist and anti-immigrant language that was posted in the online screed.
The FBI has dispatched officials from a domestic terrorism-hate crimes fusion cell to investigate the El Paso shooting. The bureau also said this week it is investigating the Dayton shooter after learning he was interested in “violent ideologies” and, separately, announced that it had opened a domestic terrorism investigation into a July 28 mass shooting at a food festival in Gilroy, California.
During the Gilroy shooting, six days before the El Paso attack, a gunman killed three people before fatally shooting himself. The FBI said it opened the domestic terrorism probe in that case after learning that the gunman had also explored “violent ideologies” and assembled a list of possible targets across the country.
Meanwhile, families of those killed at the El Paso Walmart gathered at funerals on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border to remember loved ones.
Angelina Silva Englisbee’s seven grown children sobbed as they draped a gold-edged white pall over her casket before escorting it into El Paso’s St. Pius X Catholic Church, where she had been a parishioner.
The funeral for Alexander Hoffmann Roth, 66, was held in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso. Born in postwar Germany, he was serving in the German air force and stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso when he crossed the border into Ciudad Juarez and met the Mexican citizen who would become his wife at a dance club.
“It’s an incredible binational place. I’ve had so many good memories in this area from Juarez and El Paso the people, the food, the music, the ambiance, everything, everything is so warm,” said his daughter, Elise Hoffmann-Taus. “And this, this really hurts.”
The funeral for Juan Velazquez, 77, was also Friday in El Paso. He and his wife, Nicholasa, were shot after parking their car. She was injured; he died Monday.