On Friday, a young white nationalist sentenced to 90 consecutive life terms in jail for shooting and killing 23 people at a grocery in the majority-Hispanic Texas city of El Paso in 2019.
Patrick Crusius, 24, pled guilty in February to federal hate crime charges in connection with a mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart on August 3, 2019.
Crusius is still facing a state-level trial in Texas, which has not ruled out seeking the death sentence.
“No one in this country should have to live in fear of hate-fueled violence that they will be targeted because of what they look like or where they are from,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
“The 90 consecutive life sentences announced today guarantee that Patrick Crusius will spend the rest of his life in prison for his deadly, racist rampage in El Paso,” Garland said.
The shooting, according to Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, was “one of the most horrific acts of white nationalist-driven violence in modern times.”
Crusius drove 660 miles (1,060 kilometers) with an AK-47-style assault rifle and 1,000 rounds of ammunition from Allen, Texas, near Dallas, to the Walmart Supercenter in El Paso.
He opened fire in the supermarket parking lot, killing 23 people and injuring 22 more.
According to the federal indictment, Crusius uploaded a document to the internet before the shooting titled “The Inconvenient Truth” in which he said the attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
In the tract, he said he was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement,” referring to a concept by white supremacists claiming other ethnic groups are “replacing” them in the population.
Crusius said he chose the border city of El Paso as his target to dissuade Hispanic immigrants from coming to the United States.
When police arrived, Crusius exited his vehicle and identified himself as the shooter. He told authorities while in detention that he planned to kill “Mexicans.”
The shooting sparked a discussion on how then-President Donald Trump’s repeated bashing of immigrants influenced the behavior of his supporters.
The attack on Crusius was one of the bloodiest mass shootings in US history.
It happened two years after a gunman killed 58 people at a Las Vegas outdoor concert and three years after a guy massacred 49 people at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
