The gunman who killed 23 people in a racist attack at El Paso Walmart in one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history in 2019 was offered a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, Texas prosecutors said Tuesday.
An announcement by El Paso County District Attorney James Montoya is a significant shift in the criminal case of Patrick Crucius, 26, who has already been sentenced to 90 consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to federal hate crime charges in 2023.
Under the Biden administration, federal prosecutors also removed the death penalty from the table, but did not explain why.
In addition to the federal lawsuit, Crucius was also charged with capital murder in state court.
Montoya said he supports the death penalty and believes Crucius deserves it. However, he said he met with the victim's family, and while some relatives were willing to wait as long as they were sentenced to death, there was a top desire to finish the process.
“The majority of them want to exchange this case and do it as quickly as possible,” he said.
Montoya also said pursuing the death penalty means a long and drawn-out legal battle between many hearings and complaints.
“If we kept asking for the death penalty, this was the worst case scenario that we couldn't go to trial until 2028,” he said.
Democrat Montoya took office in January after beating a Republican incumbent appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Montoya's predecessor supported sending Crucius to death row inmates.
“I've heard about it. Honestly, I think a man deserves the death penalty,” Abbott said of the decision Tuesday. “Such shooting is the purpose of the death penalty.”
Crucius, a white man, was 21 years old and dropped out of community college when police said he drove over 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) from his home near Dallas to target Hispanics in El Paso.
The moment he posted an online racist screed warning about the state's Hispanic “invasion,” he fired with an AK-style rifle both inside and outside the store.
Before the shooting, Crucius appears to have been consumed by immigration debates, posting online in support of building a border wall, and praises other messages celebrating then-President Donald Trump's hard-hitting border policy. He went further with the rant he posted before the attack, saying Hispanics would take over the government and the economy.
Years after the shooting, Republicans have called immigrants across the tropical borders “aggression” and dismissed criticism that such rhetoric promotes anti-immigrant views and violence.
In the case of the US government, Crucius received a life sentence for each of the 90 charges against him. Half of these were classified as hate crimes. After the verdict, then General Merrick Garland said, “No one in this country must live in fear of hateful violence.”
One of his lawyers told the judge before the verdict that his client had a “brain-bruised brain” and that his ideas were “conflict with reality.”
Federal prosecutors did not formally explain their decision not to seek the death penalty, but admitted that Crucius suffers from schizoaffective disorder, which could be marked by hallucinations, delusions and mood swings.
The people killed were from 15-year-old high school athletes to several grandparents. They included immigrants, retired city bus drivers, teachers, merchants including former iron workers, and several Mexican nationals who crossed the US border on their daily shopping trips.
In 2023, Crusius agreed to pay the victims more than $5 million. Court records show that his lawyer and the Department of Justice had reached an agreement over the amount of compensation and was subsequently approved by a US district judge. There was no indication that he had any significant assets.
