Photo: Combo-Photos of EFE and Getty Images / Impremedia
By: The opinion
The federal sentencing hearing for the gunman Patrick Crusius, what caused the massacre at a Walmart store in El PasoTexas, in which 23 people were killed and 22 others injured, began Wednesday.
The sentencing hearing of Patrick Crusius, a 24-year-old who pleaded guilty in February to 90 federal charges, including hate crimesis held at the courthouse in El Paso and could last several days, according to court records.
Survivors and family members of the victims of the August 2019 Walmart massacre in El Paso, Texas, spent an emotional Wednesday in a federal courtroom speaking for the first time directly with the man convicted of causing one of the deadliest attacks against Latinos in modern US history, according to CNN.
For about two hours Wednesday, the victims’ sons, widows, brothers and daughters, some crying, used words like “coward,” “monster,” “murderer,” “enemy,” “parasite” and “bastard” to describe to Crusius.
Less than half an hour before the attack, Crusius posted an online tirade against an alleged “invasion” of Texas by Hispanics and warned that they would take over the government and economy.
Emotions have run high in the four years since Crusius stormed a Walmart in the predominantly Latino border city of El Paso, unleashing a fiery fury minutes after posting a hate-filled manifesto online deploring the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” ”.
“Why are we the ones who suffer and not you?”
That was what one of the survivors, Génesis Dávila, said, addressing the gunman. She was raising money for her soccer team outside Walmart when the attack occurred, injuring her father and mother and killing her coach. “Nobody invited you to our quiet city,” Dávila said.
Prosecutors said that Crusius, 24, and white, drove 700 miles from his home in Allen, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, to the Walmart supercenter, in a popular shopping center. Armed with a semi-automatic rifle he had purchased online, the gunman stalked and shot shoppers and workers in the parking lot, in the aisles and behind the cash registers.
Crusius’s defense has said he would make his statements at the conclusion of the victims’ presentations, possibly on Thursday.
Other mass shootings in Texas that occurred after the Walmart attack have also affected Latinosincluding last year’s massacre at a primary school in Uvalde that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
Keep reading:
– They remember the victims of the El Paso massacre, the worst racist attack against Latinos in the US.
– Perpetrator of the massacre in El Paso where 23 people died pleaded guilty
– Sentencing hearing for the perpetrator of the El Paso massacre is postponed to July