A long-term criminal lawsuit against a Texas gunman who killed 23 people in a racist attack targeting Hispanic shoppers at Walmart in El Paso in 2019 is on the verge of an end.
Patrick Crucius, 26, pleaded guilty Monday and is expected to receive a life sentence in a prison where there is no chance of parole for a massacre near the US-Mexico border.
El Paso County District Attorney James Montoya said last month that he was offering a plea deal to Crucius and would not face the death penalty in the state charges.
Crusius has been sentenced to 90 consecutive life sentences in federal court after pleading guilty in 2023 to dislike crime and weapons charges.
Under the Biden administration, federal prosecutors also removed the death penalty from the table.
Crucius is expected to serve his time in state prisons. Crusius will initially gain custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice if he was initially arrested by a local government and declared on a state charge, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Prisons said.
Here’s what you need to know about the fatal attacks of August 3, 2019 and its aftermath:
attack
Crucius, 21, said authorities drove from his Dallas home in suburbs to El Paso for more than 10 hours and fired at Walmart, a popular choice among shoppers in Mexico and America.
Prosecutors said he was wearing an earmuff to calm the sound of gunfire as Crucius began shooting people dead in the parking lot.
He then moved into the store, continuing to fire AK-style rifles, cornering shoppers at the bank near the entrance where nine people were killed before filming people in the check-out area and corridor.
He left Walmart and fired in a passing car, killing an old man and injuring his wife.
Police say Crucius was soon arrested and confessed to an officer who stopped him at the intersection.
Target Hispanic shoppers
In a post on an online message board just before the massacre, Crucius said that the white community and university dropout was a filming “in response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
He said Hispanics would take over the government and the economy.
On social media, he was consumed by the country’s immigration debate, tweeting #BuildThewall and posting praises Republican President Donald Trump’s hard-line border policy in his first term at the time.
After the shooting, Crucius told officers he targeted the Mexicans.
Joe Spencer, one of Crucius’s lawyers, described Crucius as “an individual with a broken brain.” Thursday. Spencer said Crusius has been diagnosed with schizophrenia disorder, which could be marked by hallucinations, delusions and mood swings.
Victims
The people killed were from 15-year-old high school athletes to grandparents.
They included immigrants and Mexican citizens who crossed the US border on their daily shopping trips.
They included Jordan Anchond and Andre Anchond. He was killed while shopping with Paul, a surviving two-month-old child.
Authorities said her husband protected both while Jordan Ancheondo said he protected the baby from shooting.
Guillermo “Memo” Garcia and his wife Jessica Coca Garcia were fundraising for their daughter’s soccer team in the parking lot when both were shot. She suffered from a wound on her leg, but she recovered.
He died of injuries nearly nine months after the shooting, bringing the death toll to 23.
A week after the shooting, Coca Garcia rose from his wheelchair and gave a speech across the road from the county jail where Crucius was being held.
“Racism is something I always thought didn’t exist,” she said. “Obviously that’s true.”
Long-term lawsuits
Montoya said the majority of the victims’ relatives were eager to resolve the case and therefore decided to offer a plea agreement. He admitted that not all families agreed.
Democrat Montoya said he supports the death penalty and believes Crucius is worth it, but if his office continued to seek the death penalty, the case may not have been brought to trial until 2028.
When Montoya took office in January, he became the fourth district attorney to oversee the case in nearly six years.
One of his predecessors resigned in 2022 after being pressured to handle the lawsuit.
He said the pandemic also caused delays.
Stephanie Melendez, whose father, David Johnson, died protecting his wife and granddaughter, said that he initially wanted Crucius to be sentenced to death, but he wanted to end it while dragging it on.
“I just wanted to finish it,” Melendez said. “I relived everything. I went to court for hours, and the briefing that happened after it was the same story over and over is over, because honestly, it’s like trauma over and over again.
