A federal court on Friday sentenced a young American white supremacist who killed 23 people at a popular El Paso Hispanic supermarket in 2019 to 90 consecutive life sentences.
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Patrick Crusius, 24, pleaded guilty in February to 90 charges against him, including “racist offenses resulting in death.”
He also faces a lawsuit in Texas that has not ruled out seeking the death penalty.
At the beginning of August 2019, Patrick Crusius published a document containing white supremacist theses on the Internet in which he denounced the “Spanish invasion of Texas” and praised the mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand (51 dead).
Then he drove about ten hours from the Dallas suburbs where he lived, to El Paso, a predominantly Hispanic city, where he fired a semi-automatic rifle at a Walmart hypermarket.
When the police arrived, he got out of the car, hands in the air, claiming to be the shooter. While in police custody, he admitted that he wanted to attack “Mexicans”.
The massacre left 23 people dead, including eight Mexicans and the majority Hispanics. The United States has been deeply shocked and opened a debate about responsibility for the anti-immigration rhetoric of Republican President Donald Trump.
The El Paso massacre remains one of the deadliest killings in US history, yet it is regularly missed by shootings.
