Latest: A 21-year-old gunman armed with a powerful rifle turned a crowded Walmart store in this majority-Hispanic border city into a scene of chaos and bloodshed on Saturday, stalking shoppers in the aisles in an attack that left at least 20 people dead and 26 others wounded, the authorities said.
“Texas grieves for the people of El Paso today,” the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, told reporters. “On a day that would have been a normal day for someone to leisurely go shopping, turned into one of the most deadly days in the history of Texas.”
The authorities identified the gunman as Patrick Crusius, from a Dallas suburb. He was taken into custody after he surrendered to the police outside the Walmart. The authorities said they were investigating a manifesto Mr. Crusius, who is white, may have posted before the shooting, which described an attack in response to “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
“Right now, we have a manifesto from this individual,” El Paso’s police chief, Greg Allen, told reporters, though he said later that law enforcement officers were still not clear whether the gunman had posted the document.
El Paso has become a focal point of the immigration debate, drawing Trump in February to argue that walling off the southern border would make the U.S. safer, while city residents and O’Rourke led thousands on a protest march past the barrier of barbed wire-topped fencing and towering metal slats.
The manifesto the chief appeared to be referring to was an anti-immigrant online screed titled “The Inconvenient Truth.” The post declares support for the gunman who killed 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand; outlines fears about Hispanic people gaining power in the United States; and appears to discuss specific details about elements of the attack, including weapons. The four-page manifesto was posted on 8chan, an online forum where the Christchurch gunman also announced his attack. It appeared to have been published at 10:20 a.m., 19 minutes before the first 911 call, according to an archived version of the website.
The waves of migrants, and the difficulty the Trump administration has had providing shelter and medical care to them, has been a focus of Democratic lawmakers and Democratic presidential candidates in an election campaign in which immigration has become a central focus. But the city has also been home to generations of Mexican-Americans who consider themselves more Texan than Mexican. On a clear day, Mexico is visible from the shopping center parking lot.
Some of the wounded on Saturday were identified by the authorities as Mexican citizens, including a 10-year-old girl
The shooting is the 21st mass killing in the United States in 2019, and the fifth public mass shooting. Before Saturday, 96 people had died in mass killings in 2019 26 of them in public mass shootings.
An off-duty soldier is drawing widespread praise after telling media how he picked up children during the El Paso shooting and carried them to safety.
Army specialist Glendon Oakley told the local television station KVIA that he was inside the Cielo Vista Mall when a young child approached and told him there was an active shooter inside the Walmart nearby.
“A little kid ran in there telling us ‘there’s an active shooter in Walmart,’ but we didn’t pay it no attention because for one it’s a just little kid, and for two we’re at the mall and not at Walmart,” Oakley said. “We just didn’t pay no mind.”
Via New York Times /France24 / The Guardian / Twitter / Military Insider
Earlier Update: A law enforcement official says at least 15 people were killed in the attack at an El Paso shopping center and that the suspect who was taken into custody is 21-year-old Patrick Crusius.
The official was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The official also stresses that the death count is preliminary and that the investigation is still ongoing.
Police say most of the victims of Saturday’s attack appear to have been at a Walmart near the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso, though they say the mall had also been “secured.”
Earlier Update:: One person was killed, 22 others were seriously injured and at least one suspect was in custody after a shooting Saturday at a shopping mall in the Texas border town of El Paso, hospital officials and police said.
Police responded in the early afternoon to an active shooter scene at the Cielo Vista Mall, near Interstate 10 on the east side of the city, and were advising people to stay away from the area and to look for missing family members at a school being used as a reunification area. Police and witnesses said at least some of the shootings happened in a Walmart in the shopping complex.
Ryan Mielke, a spokesman for University Medical Center of El Paso, said 12 people were brought to the hospital with injuries, including one that died. Two of the injured were children who were being transferred to El Paso Children’s Hospital, he said. He declined to provide additional details on the victims.
Earlier Report: Multiple people were killed Saturday in a mass shooting.
The El Paso Police Department said the scene remained active around the Cielo Vista Mall, near the WalMart.
Several people have been transported to the hospital, El Paso Police Sgt. Enrique Castillo told reporters, and authorities do not believe there is an ongoing threat.
Three suspects were in custody, El Paso Mayor Dee Margo told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Castillo had previously said there was one person in custody.
At least three businesses were on lockdown in the area, about three miles south of El Paso International Airport. Three Walmart employees took refuge at a nearby Landry’s Seafood house, restaurant manager Oscar Collazo told CNN. The women appeared “shook up” but not injured. Landry’s had already gone on lockdown, he said, but opened its doors when the employees ran there. “We never thought it would be so close to us this time,” Collazo said. “You see on the news all the time, but you don’t think it could happen here until it does.”
Other stores at the nearby mall were also locked down as police officers cleared the shopping center in the east of the city, which lies on the southern U.S. border with Mexico.
Via CNN / Reuters
