The gunman who killed 23 people in a racist attack at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 will spend the rest of his life in prison after pleading guilty to one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history and the worst domestic terror attack on Hispanics that the country has ever seen.
Patrick Crusius, 26, entered a guilty plea to capital murder and 22 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon on April 21. Wearing a bulletproof vest, he stared straight ahead as the El Paso County District Attorney James Montoya read out the names of the nearly two dozen people killed in the massacre.
District Court Judge Sam Medrano told the gunman that, as he spends the rest of his life in prison, his name and hatred will be forgotten.
“On Aug. 3, 2019, you traveled nine hours to a city that would have welcomed you with open arms, but you brought hate,” Medrano said. “Now, as you begin to spend your life in prison, know your mission failed. You didn’t make this community weaker, you made it stronger.”
He will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole as part of a deal that allowed him to avoid the death penalty. Montoya said last month that he was offering Crusius the deal in an effort to bring the case to a close for the victims’ families.
Crusius has already received 90 consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to federal hate crimes and weapons charges in 2023. Federal prosecutors declined to pursue the death penalty.
Gunman drove to El Paso targeting Hispanics
On the morning of Aug. 3, 2019, the gunman, who drove nearly 700 miles from Allen, Texas, to El Paso, began shooting at innocent shoppers in the parking lot of a Walmart. He continued into the store and fatally shot nine people in a bank inside the store.
He continued his massacre, killing another nine people in the aisles of the supermarket. In total, he fatally shot 23 people and injured dozens more.
He turned himself in to a Texas Department of Public Safety state trooper. He admitted to law enforcement that he committed the mass shooting to stop what he claimed was the invasion of Hispanics coming into the U.S. The mass shooting resulted in the deaths of U.S. and Mexican citizens.
Minutes before the attack, he posted writings online in which “he characterized himself as a white nationalist, motivated to kill Hispanics because they were immigrating to the United States,” according to the Department of Justice. “Crusius admitted to selecting El Paso, a border city, as his target to dissuade Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants from coming to the United States.”
