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What We Know About The El Paso Suspect: He Appears To Have Posted Anti-Immigrant Screed

A police officer stands outside a home in Allen believed to be associated with a mass shooting at a busy shopping area in the border town of El Paso last year.
Jake Bleiberg
/
Associated Press
A police officer stands outside a home in Allen believed to be associated with a mass shooting at a busy shopping area in the border town of El Paso on Saturday.

About 20 minutes before the shooting started at an El Paso Walmart, a rambling screed was posted to an online message board saying the massacre was in response to an "invasion" of Hispanics coming across the southern border.

Authorities distributed this photo of Patrick Crusius, the North Texan accused in the El Paso shootings.

Titled "The Inconvenient Truth," it railed against the dangers of mass immigration and warned that Hispanics will eventually take over the economy and government. The writer argued that attacking "low-security" targets was a way to "fight to reclaim my country from destruction."

Investigators increasingly believe these are the words of 21-year-old suspect Patrick Crusius, who surrendered shortly after Saturday's rampage , and they are looking closely at the writing as they consider whether to prosecute the slaughter of 20 people and the wounding of 26 more as a hate crime .

"We have to attribute that manifesto directly to him," El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said Sunday at a news conference. "And so we're going down that road."

What remains a mystery is why Crusius chose El Paso, which has figured prominently in the immigration debate, and a shopping complex just five miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. The scene was a 10-hour drive and a world away from the life he lived growing up in a leafy, upper-middle-class suburb of Dallas.

Security video showed a skinny young man marching through the front door of the Walmart in a black T-shirt and khaki pants, carrying an AK-47 military-style rifle with an extended capacity magazine. Witnesses say he went aisle by aisle through a store packed with people stocking up on back-to-school supplies. The dead included at least three Mexican citizens and a 25-year-old mother of three who was shot while holding her 2-month-old baby.

The first sentence of the online rant posted on the 8chan message board expressed support for the man accused of killing 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in March after posting a 74-page document promoting a white supremacist conspiracy theory called "the great replacement." That theory, promoted by French writer Renaud Camus, argues there is a plot by elites to replace whites with non-white immigrants in Europe and around the world.

The online rant speaks of a "Hispanic invasion of Texas."

"They are the instigators, not me," it says. "I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion."

Though a Twitter account that appears to belong to Crusius included pro-Trump posts praising the plan to build more border wall, the writer of the online document says his views on race predated Trump's campaign and that any attempt to blame the president for his actions was "fake news."

Still, some of the language included in the document parroted Trump's own words, characterizing Hispanic migrants as invaders taking American jobs and arguing to "send them back." Though the writer denied he was a white supremacist, the document says "race mixing" is destroying the nation and recommends dividing the United States into territorial enclaves determined by race.

The writer went on to say he has an AK-47-style semi-automatic rifle and coolly debates the positives and negatives of using that firearm rather than another military-style weapon, the AR-15, for killing as many people as possible.

Crusius, the son of a licensed therapist and a nurse, was seen on social media postings from his years at Plano High School snarling into the camera in a selfie. On his LinkedIn page, since removed, it lists a job bagging groceries and the comment: "I'm not really motivated to do anything more than what's necessary to get by. Working in general sucks. ... I spend about 8 hours every day on the computer so that counts toward technology experience I guess."

Under skills, he posted "Nothing really."

Police in Crusius' hometown of Allen, a community of about 100,000 residents 20 miles north of Dallas, said their only significant contact with him over the years was a 2014 call by his parents that he ran away. He came home 30 minutes later.

Information from an online database shows Crusius registered to vote on Election Day in 2016, not long after his 18th birthday. He listed his party affiliation as Republican.

Collin College, north of Dallas, confirmed that Crusius had been enrolled as a student from fall 2017 to spring 2019.

A Twitter account under Crusius's name that appeared not to have been updated since 2017 included a photo of Trump sitting at his desk in the Oval Office and a pro-Trump poll asking about the best way to secure the country. The potential responses were the hashtags #BuildTheWall, #NoSanctuaryCities, #KeepGitmoOpen and #BanSyrianRefugees.

Crusius responded by tweeting "#BuildTheWall is the best way that @POTUS has worked to secure our country so far!"

More than a dozen federal, state and local law enforcement officers assembled Saturday at a house in Allen . A woman answered the door at the gray stone house after a group of officers knocked. They appeared to speak with her briefly before coming inside.

Court records show Crusius' mother, Lori Lynn Crusius, filed for divorce in 2011. She has been a nurse in Texas since 1990. His father, John Bryan Crusius, is a licensed counselor. He also was a licensed instructor for alcohol education programs for minors.

Here's what else we know about Crusius:

1. The suspected gunman is from North Texas.

He lived in Allen, graduated from Plano Senior High School in 2017 and attended Collin College.

Collin College released a statement: “A student by the name of Patrick Crusius attended Collin College from fall 2017 through spring 2019. Collin College is prepared to cooperate fully with state and federal authorities in their investigation of this senseless tragedy.”

A state representative from Collin County posted this information on Twitter about the shooter:

Authorities descended on a home in Allen Saturday. WFAA-TV reports: “ATF and FBI agents in North Texas are searching homes and interviewing people who might be related to the suspect.”

2. A manifesto may be linked to the shooter.

The New York Times reports: “Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call alerted the authorities to a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso ... a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online. It spoke of a ‘Hispanic invasion of Texas.’ It detailed a plan to separate America into territories by race. It warned that white people were being replaced by foreigners.”

El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen told reporters Sunday that "we have to attribute that manifesto directly" to Crusius.

In the racist screed, the writer expresses concern that an influx of Hispanics into the United States will replace aging white voters, potentially turning Texas blue in upcoming elections and swinging the White House to the Democrats.

The writer is also critical of Republicans for what he described as close ties to corporations and degradation of the environment. Though a Twitter account that appears to belong to Patrick Crusius included pro-Donald Trump posts praising the border wall plan, the writer of the online document says his views on race predated Trump's campaign.

Though the writer denied he was a white supremacist, the document says "race mixing" is destroying the nation and recommends dividing the United States into territorial enclaves determined by race.

The area where the shooting occurred is about 5 miles from the main border checkpoint with Ciudad Juárez, and the mayor said that tens of thousands of Mexicans legally cross the border each day to work and shop in El Paso.

3. He was ‘a loner.'

The Los Angeles Times interviewed people who say they knew the suspected gunman:

The Times reported: “Leigh Ann Locascio, a former neighbor, said Crusius was an extreme loner who always sat alone on the bus in junior high and high school. He spoke negatively of other kids who played sports or joined the school band, she said. She described Crusius as ‘very much a loner, very standoffish’ and someone who ‘didn’t interact a whole lot with anyone.’”

4. He had limited interactions with Allen police.    

Allen police say there’s no record of anyone contacting the police department regarding the suspect “and any activity that he may have been engaged in or involved in.” Otherwise, the police department had limited interaction with the suspect in recent years. In 2014, the suspect, then a juvenile, was reported as a runaway, but returned home within 30 minutes without incident. In 2016, the suspect was listed as a passenger on a Plano ISD school bus that was involved in a minor traffic accident. In March, the suspect called Allen dispatch to report a false residential alarm at his grandparents’ home. The call was “cleared without incident.”

Allen neighborhood reacts

neighbor_reaction_-_mawajdeh.mp3
In Allen, Texas, residents in the suspected shooter's neighborhood react to the El Paso shooting.

On Saturday, as authorities descended on Allen's Star Creek neighborhood, neighbors lined up near police barricades. Some even walked up to FBI officials asking what was going on.

Ajay Kumar lives one block away from the suspect’s house.

“It’s sad to hear that people in this kind of neighborhood, they grow up so disturbed and it’s hard to understand what goes through their mind,” Kumar said.

That sentiment seemed to be shared by many observers. But Alice Baland says this won’t shake her community – she calls her neighborhood a good family.

“Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it, because we have so much love in this neighborhood we’ll look out for each other and I think it’ll be OK,” Baland said.

KERA's Eric Aasen, Christopher Connelly and Hady Mawajdeh contributed to this report.