Five and a half years ago, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old with a documented history of mental illness, stopped at a Walmart in the border city of El Paso, heard everyone around him speaking in Spanish, and decided “the invasion” that then-President Donald J. Trump often spoke of was underway.
Mr. Crusius’s rampage on Aug. 3, 2019, took the lives of 23 people, both U.S. citizens and Mexican nationals who had crossed the border to do some shopping, becoming the deadliest attack on Hispanic civilians in American history.
His attorney, Joe Spencer, said on Tuesday in an interview ahead of his client’s sentencing hearing scheduled for April 21 for state charges that Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric was to blame. The president’s words, combined with “severe mental illness,” fueled Mr. Crusius’s hate, the lawyer said in his office in El Paso.
“He thinks this is the invasion,” said Mr. Spencer, who has represented the gunman since his arrest. He added, “In his mind, he’s saying, ‘I’m getting a direct order from the president. I have to do something.’”
The ugly saga, which began in a fusillade of bullets and was then mired by legal setbacks and red tape, concludes this month just as the same anti-immigration rhetoric that may have inspired the Walmart gunman returns with Mr. Trump’s second administration. The president is embarking on an aggressive campaign to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and the word “invasion” is now a legal pretext for deportations and foreign incarceration with little to no due process, critics say.
That has cast a pall over El Paso just when the families of the victims and survivors of the deadly shooting of 2019 must confront the crime again. Christopher Morales, 39, whose aunt was killed that day and whose mother and grandmother suffered severe injures, said Mr. Trump’s influence will be on his mind when he attends the sentencing hearing.
“I do believe that Donald Trump and all of the things that he was spreading had everything to do with him, the shooter, making his decision to come and shoot my family,” Mr. Morales said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In 2019, as he was leaving the White House to visit El Paso in the wake of the shooting, Mr. Trump commented, “Whether it’s white supremacy, whether it’s any other kind of supremacy, whether it’s antifa, whether it’s any group of hate, I am very concerned about it.”
Jessica García, who lost her husband in the massacre, said that she confronted Mr. Trump that day as he visited a hospital. “I actually told Trump it was his fault,” she said. “I told him he put us on the map” for the gunman to find.
Yet El Paso is divided, a mark of Mr. Trump’s appeal to many Hispanics, even those directly affected by the 2019 carnage.
Deborah Anchondo, who lost a brother that day, described herself as a conservative voter who supports Mr. Trump’s strict immigration policies, part of a wave of Latino voters who helped propel him to victory. Under the Biden administration she witnessed surges of migrants that overwhelmed the city, with dozens sleeping on the streets, bus stations and crossing through her property, she said.
The gunman, she said, insisted in his manifesto that his motive “has nothing to do with Trump.” That was enough for her. (Mr. Spencer said his client’s attempt to clear Mr. Trump of responsibility ahead of the shooting only proved he was aware of the president’s rhetoric.)
For many in the city, current and past events feel inextricable. A local prosecutor announced in late March that he would not seek the death penalty after speaking with the families of the victims, a decision that rankled some. They wondered how Attorney General Pam Bondi could decide this week to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, who was charged with murdering one insurance executive, while the same fate did not await the man who killed 23 in their city.
On federal charges, the gunman had previously been sentenced to 90 consecutive life terms.
For Esgar Eulalio Reyes, a 44-year-old Army veteran, Mr. Crusius is a terrorist who deserved the death penalty.
“If he said that his intention was to come to a major metropolitan area, where there was a mass population of Hispanics, and his role was to exterminate them, I don’t know any other definition of what a terrorist is,” Mr. Reyes said. “They want to call somebody a terrorist because they go and graffiti a Tesla. Imagine that.”
It was, in fact, the Department of Justice under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that decided not to seek the death penalty. Federal prosecutors did not explain their decision in the one-page brief submitted in 2023, but Mr. Spencer said he believed it had to with his client’s “severe mental” illness.
Since he was young, his client has heard voices and felt presences that were not there. He was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a condition that caused him to have violent thoughts and hallucinations.
Mental illness and white supremacy proved to be an incendiary mix. The gunman became lost in racist, far-right corners of the internet that espoused the “White Replacement” theory, a conspiracy that maintains people of color are being imported to the country to destroy the power and prosperity of white people, Mr. Spencer said.
The gunman told police officers that he had driven more than 600 miles from the Dallas area to kill Latinos because “they were immigrating to the United States.”
But, Mr. Spencer said, Mr. Crusius decided on his target, the Walmart in a popular commercial district, only after he heard people around him speaking Spanish.
In El Paso, which long has been seen as an Ellis Island of the Southwest, a destination for migrants from all over the world, the past feels very present to many.
Ruby Montana, 43, a lecturer at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Chicano Studies Department, told hundreds of people gathered earlier this week to commemorate Cesar Chavez, the Mexican American civil rights leader, that the mass shooting was intertwined with Mr. Trump’s aggressive policies toward illegal immigration.
“Words can make people believe in the idea of the Hispanic invasion of Texas when the reality is that we didn’t cross the border,” Ms. Montana told the crowd. “The border crossed us,” she said to angry cheers.
Guillermo Glenn, 84, who attended the rally, recalled being at Walmart the day of the shooting and helping some of the wounded people into shopping carts to escape the bloodshed.
“Trump has said so many things,” Mr. Glenn said. “He has expressed so much racism, and now it is even worse.”
The pain of the mass shooting is felt by Mr. Trump’s detractors and supporters alike. In a car repair shop that Ms. Anchondo’s family owns, she stopped this week to study a memorial of photographs dedicated to her brother, Andre Anchondo, and his wife, Jordan, who died protecting their infant from the bullets. Only their child, Paul, who was grazed by a bullet, survived.
The case has been marred by legal machinations, dragging it out for families like Ms. Anchondo. The newly elected El Paso district attorney, James Montoya, became the fourth prosecutor to take over the case after years of legal fillings from all sides. Mr. Montoya, a Democrat, had campaigned on a promise to seek the death penalty, but he backtracked after he took office and spoke with families of the victims.
Ms. Anchondo said it was the right decision. The moment a federal judge sentenced the gunman, who pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges, to 90 consecutive life sentences, she said, the “case was over.”
“My opinion is, I’m glad it’s over and done with,” she said softly.
Karla Andrea Romero, 29, a U.S. Air Force veteran who lost her mother, Gloria Irma Marquez, in the shooting, said emphatically that it was the wrong decision. She did not blame Mr. Trump. Racism has existed for centuries, she said.
Her anger is aimed at Mr. Montoya, the district attorney. She is trying to force a recall election.
“I wanted the case to go to trial,” Ms. Romero said, adding, “we have to make a change locally.”
The sentencing hearing for the state charges could also be a reminder that the nation should not forget what happened in El Paso, amid all the mass shootings that have come since.
“America is tired. It’s tired of all this nonsense. It’s tired of Uvalde. It’s tired of El Paso,” Mr. Reyes said. “They think that time is going to go ahead and heal the wound, but this wound is not going to heal in this community.”
Edgar Sandoval covers Texas for The Times, with a focus on the Latino community and the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio. More about Edgar Sandoval
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