Mass Shooting Kills 20 at El Paso Walmart: Gunman ‘Started Shooting Everyone, Aisle by Aisle,’ Witness Says
EL PASO—A lone gunman killed at least 20 people inside a crowded Walmart on Saturday morning, according to eyewitnesses and officials.
“A day that would’ve been a normal day for someone to leisurely go shopping, turned into one of the most deadly days in the history of Texas. Lives were taken who should still be with us today. Twenty innocent people from El Paso have lost their lives, and more than two dozen more are injured,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at an evening press conference.
At least 22 people were transported to area hospitals, including a 4-month-old girl. At least nine people were in critical condition at Del Sol Medical Center, where three of them were said to be in “life-threatening” condition. The victims there ranged in age from 35 to 82, but no further details were immediately available.
Police have not yet identified those killed, seven Mexican nationals were reportedly among the dead.
Police said one person is in custody and they have ruled out multiple shooters. The suspect has been identified as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius of Allen, Texas, according to a senior law-enforcement source. Authorities are investigating a purported manifesto posted online shortly before the attack.
“Right now we have a manifesto from this individual, that indicates to some degree, it has a nexus to potential hate crime,” El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said at a press conference. Allen said authorities were still working to “validate” that the manifesto was penned by the alleged gunman.
“We will seek the death penalty,” El Paso Country District Attorney Jaime Esparza said at a press conference Sunday morning. John Bash, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, said his office was "seriously considering" hate crime and federal firearms charges":
"We are treating it as a domestic terrorism case, and we’re gonna do what we do to terrorists in this country, which is deliver swift and certain justice.”
"Technically," said El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen, Crusius "was in the realm of the law” until the moment he opened fire, since Texas is an open-carry state.
More than a thousand people were inside the Walmart near the Cielo Vista Mall when the shooting started around 11 a.m. A woman named Karina, who declined to give her last name, said she was driving in the parking lot with her 7-year-old daughter when she saw a white man in his twenties in front of the store’s main entrance, dressed in all black and carrying a long rifle. Karina said she heard what sounded like “balloons popping” and saw the gunman shoot another man at “point-blank” range.
Then the gunman entered the store, as captured by surveillance footage.
Miguel Rodriguez said he was shopping for a toy for his 7-year-old son when he heard gunshots and ducked to the ground. He said a person “started shooting everyone, aisle by aisle, with rage.”
Britney, a 19-year-old who declined to give her last name, said she was with her 16-year-old brother and her mother in the store’s underwear aisle when she heard shooting. The family dropped to the ground. Then Britney said she grabbed her mother and brother’s hands and they ran out of the store.
Dozens of people from inside the mall who were evacuated lined a nearby street. A man carrying a Bible went from group to group, asking people to pray with him.
Hours after the shooting on Saturday night, as authorities continued the grim task of sifting through the scene of the carnage, many El Paso residents chose to come together at a vigil just a couple miles from the attack.
“I didn’t have to lose someone to hurt,” Ashley, one of the residents at the vigil at the St Pius X Church, told The Daily Beast. She said El Paso, which ordinary feels so safe, felt like chaos today.
Another attendee, Victor Lopez, said he’d been at Walmart with his family on Saturday morning but left before the gunfire erupted. He decided to attend the vigil, he said, to honor the 20 people who weren’t so lucky.
Other residents said some people affected by the attack in the predominantly Hispanic city were afraid to go to hospitals or the reunification center designated by authorities for fear that their immigration status would come under scrutiny.
The El Paso shooting is the latest in a series of deadly attacks on public places. On Monday, a disgruntled employee killed two people in a Walmart store in Mississippi. Last Sunday, a gunman killed three people and injured 15 at the Gilroy Garlic Festival near San Jose, California. In May, a gunman killed 12 people at a municipal building in Virginia Beach. The month before, on the last day of Passover in April, a vocal anti-Semite allegedly attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one person.
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