1 day ago
7
U.S.|A Gunman Returns to El Paso. So Does the Hateful Rhetoric That Inspired Him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/us/el-paso-mass-shooting-trump.html
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
The lawyer of the white supremacist who slaughtered 23 people in 2019 said his client was inspired by President Trump’s words, the same the president is using today.
April 3, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
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.
