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Diego Mendoza-Moyers: Six years after the worst mass shooting in El Paso’s history, new information is still coming to light. Because the case never went to trial, only now is some of the evidence that would have emerged in court being made public through open records requests.
El Paso Matters CEO Bob Moore will join me in a moment to refresh us on how the case against the shooter concluded earlier this year. And we’ll also talk about what we learned in the information that law enforcement officials recently released and how our news outlet handled some of the material, including video footage of the carnage.
I also asked Bob about the journalistic judgment involved here, and why, six years after this massacre, El Paso Matters is still pursuing information and continuing to publish stories about what happened here on August 3rd, 2019.
Before we go on to my discussion with Bob, I want to mention that this El Paso Matters Podcast episode is sponsored by Tawney, Acosta and Chaparro, truck crash and injury attorneys. Their team of local, seasoned trial attorneys are ready to help if you’ve been injured in a crash.
Now, on to the conversation.
Bob, thanks for joining me again.
Bob Moore: Glad to be here.
Diego: So, can you briefly remind us how the case involving the August 3rd, 2019, Walmart shooting was resolved earlier this year, and why new information has come to light?
Bob: Yeah. So, the gunman in the case, Patrick Crusius, was charged both in federal court and in state court. In federal court, he faced charges of use of a weapon, use of a firearm in commission of a crime, which carried the potential death penalty, as well as hate crimes charges in state court.
He faced a capital murder charge, which carried the possibility of a death penalty, and then a bunch of aggravated assault charges that also carried life sentences. So, in 2023, the federal government, specifically the Justice Department, which was headed at the time by Merrick Garland, the attorney general in the Biden administration, reached a decision that they would not seek the death penalty.
Shortly thereafter, the gunman agreed to plead guilty. This was in February of 2023, and then, in July of 2023, he was sentenced to 90 consecutive life terms in federal prison.
The state case then started to come alive again. It had, basically, been put on hold while the federal case was playing out. The district attorney – there were actually four district attorneys who touched this case, which adds to the complications. Jaime Esparza was the district attorney in 2019 when this happened. He did not run for reelection in 2020. Yvonne Rosales was elected in that race. She then resigned in 2022, in part, over allegations that she mishandled the Walmart case. Bill Hicks was appointed by Governor Abbott to fill out her term. He served through 2024. He was defeated by James Montoya. And how to handle the Walmart case was an election issue, as you know, because you covered that race. Bill Hicks really wanted to continue to pursue the death penalty. James Montoya initially told you that he wanted to pursue the death penalty, but then kind of softened on that a little bit as the campaign unfolded.
So, he took office in January, and then in March, he announced that the state would no longer seek the death penalty and said that was because that was the general consensus of the families. Not unanimous by any means, but the families of the people who were killed in the attack really were worn out, I think, by the process – we’re now right at the six-year mark of when this happened – and the families were just on a roller coaster. And I think many of them decided, “Let’s just lock this guy up so we don’t have to think about him again.”
So, after the state made that decision, the defense quickly agreed to a guilty plea. And so, finally, in April, we had the conclusion of the case where the gunman was found guilty after his guilty plea and sentenced to a state term of life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus a number of other sentences. And then he was sent to a state prison, where he is today.
One of the results of all of that is that, because he pleaded guilty, there was never a stage where evidence was introduced about what happened. So, we knew as a community sort of the broad constructs of what occurred on August 3rd, 2019: that this gunman had driven 10 hours from North Texas, a suburb called Allen, came to El Paso, entered the Walmart near Cielo Vista Mall and killed 23 people and wounded 22 others.
We knew who his victims were, and it ranged in age from from 15 up to people, I think, in their early 90s. We knew that he opened fire on a girls soccer team that was holding a fundraiser. So, we knew some of those broad details, but we did not know the kinds of things you would have learned as a trial came about.
And I asked James Montoya at a press conference in March after he announced his decision whether he thought the community was losing something by not having a trial. And he agreed that that was true and he understood the objection. But he also said there are other ways of getting this information out, and he kind of pointed to the media and said you can file open records request, which, obviously, we at El Paso Matters had planned to do so. That kind of sets the stage for what happened in July.
Diego: Yeah. And, so, as you’re saying, I mean, we were all familiar with the general, broad details of what happened that day. But I’m curious what new information came out from these records, and was it records from the federal case or the state case that yielded new information?
Bob: So, what came out was mostly a series of videos as well as some crime scene photographs, as well as a report compiled by the Texas Department of Public Safety. DPS was among many law enforcement agencies that were involved in the August 3rd shooting investigation, but they weren’t a main investigator, and frankly, I had not even thought of seeking records from them.
But a YouTuber that publishes a page called the Interrogation Files did file a request with DPS for records it may possess, and they were obviously mainly looking for video. They got it, and they stitched together a 57 minute video mostly focusing on the first police investigation, interrogation of Patrick Crusius that was published on July 19th.
And when I saw it, they didn’t really say where they had gotten the information. I found an email address for them, sent an email and got a response back really quickly where they kind of explained to me that they got it after requesting it from DPS and, unprompted, said “We’re happy to share this with you.” So, I said, “OK,” and they shared the files with me that day.
And, so, these files are really mostly connected to the state case. Having said that, one of the key videos was a document that was put together by the FBI using a lot of their forensic tools that basically created a 36 minute video that tracked the moment that Crusius’ car could first be seen coming into the Walmart parking lot to the point where he leaves after the shooting. And that turns out to be a period of about an hour and 40 minutes.
So, that gets us to sort of the first really important thing that the public now understands that we didn’t before, and that’s that Crucius had spent quite a bit of time in the store unarmed before the shooting. The video shows that he walked into the Walmart for the first time just a little before 9 a.m. on August 3rd. He had told police investigators later that he had left his home in North Texas at midnight, which, adjusting for the time change, would have been about 11 p.m. El Paso time. So, that’s that 10-hour window that has long been talked about.
So, he goes into the store, and one of the things that you know watching the video really struck me is how, for the first hour and a half of all of this, it is just such a typical Saturday in El Paso. People shopping, people going about their business. Because this video focuses on Crusius’ movements, it tells us a little bit about him as well. It’s really clear from the video that he was seeking not to make contact with other people.
At one point, you could see him coming down an aisle and two men are coming up from the opposite direction and he pivots and reverses and goes the other way, so he doesn’t intersect with them.
Shortly after that, there’s this other moment that still really haunts me. He’s looking at his phone. We know from other investigative records that on his phone was the manifesto that he had written talking about wanting to stop the Hispanic invasion of Texas. I don’t know that that’s what he was looking at, but we do know that he would upload it online a short time later.
So, while he’s looking at his phone, this woman comes out of the aisle and kind of looks around and you could tell she’s looking for help from somebody. And the only other person in the frame is Patrick Crusius. So, she approaches him and his head is still down on the phone, so he does not see her coming up until she addresses him. And he, after a couple of seconds of her talking, just kind of shrugs his shoulders like “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” I later learned from his defense attorney that she was speaking to him in Spanish.
And, so, she then kind of laughs a little bit, clasps her hand together and then kind of lifts her hands toward the ceiling three times. And you can tell because you’ve seen this gesture plenty of times that “I need somebody taller than me to help me get this thing down.”
And, so, Crusius just kind of nods, they walk down the aisle together. They’re not directly in the camera frame, but at one point you could see the hands reaching to the top shelf. She then goes off frame completely, he comes back and I was just struck that this is a reminder of what El Paso is. This is a community where people feel safe going up to strangers and asking for small favors. And this is a community where we think nothing of doing that. This is just really this human moment.
So, Crusius is in there for a little bit more and then at about 9:27 or so, he leaves the store and he goes, walks back to his car and he gets to the car. He opens the door, doesn’t get in, closes the door and then goes back to the store. I don’t know why. But he goes back to the grocery section and picks up a bag of oranges. He had left earlier without buying anything.
So, again, it’s this other moment of everyday life: somebody comes into Walmart to buy some fruit. So, he picks out the bag of oranges, walks to the self checkout counter again. I think a sign that he’s trying to avoid human contact puts a card in to pay for it. The card for some reason takes a little while to go through, about 15 seconds, and he’s really kind of pacing nervously. Then the payment goes through and he again heads out of the store, but then kind of pivots back in and he’s off camera because there weren’t a lot of cameras within the waiting area around the entrance.
But, at one point, you can see him walking by the camera, eating half an orange, and again, one of those moments, that’s just like a typical Saturday in summer in El Paso. He eventually goes back to his car and then sits in there for almost an hour. And we know from a forensic analysis that was later done that it was during this time right at about 10:20 a.m. that he uploads the manifesto to a website called 8Chan that was this hellhole occupied by white supremacists.
He continues to sit in the car and then at about 10:18 or so – or no, I’m sorry, just a little bit after 10:20 – just shortly after he uploaded the file, another group of shoppers that are parked next to him can be seen kind of unloading things into their car. And, again, he immediately pulls out and goes and parks somewhere else for a couple of minutes. And then starts up the car again and drives back toward the Walmart, heads toward the entrance, makes a left on the road in front of the Walmart, and then this is a really significant moment for me. He cuts across the sidewalk at the corner of the Walmart, and there are pedestrians nearby. But, I wouldn’t say within more than 15 feet of him. And he cuts through the sidewalk and then pulls forward into a parking space that’s there.
He’s largely off camera for this period. It’s about 3 minutes, but you can see it just in the the edge of the video at one point, he’s strapping something over his shoulder. And, looking at the video later, it’s clear to me that he was putting on the pouch that held the ammunition magazines that he would use.
So, after three minutes there he leaves, he drives back through the parking lot, kind of weaves, looks for a parking space. And winds up parking right in about the middle of the parking lot. People who shop at Walmart know that Walmart is divided into two sections. There’s a general merchandise entrance, and then the grocery entrance. He had been using the grocery entrance up throughout.
He kind of parked right in between those two. And then comes, gets out of his car, pops the trunk and you can see him doing some things behind the trunk. He’s hidden most of the time. But, at one moment, you can see him putting on shooter muffs, the ear muffs that people use at rifle ranges to prevent damage to their ears.
He then slams the hood shut, levels his rifle ahead of him and starts marching forward. And about 14 seconds after he had closed the trunk, a woman came around the corner pushing a shopping cart and went right into his path. And that was his first victim. He then shoots some other people, the girls soccer team section, and then goes into the store and carries out the carnage.
He would later tell investigators that he left because it was “nasty,” was his term, meaning it was bloody and everything. To me, having watched the video, that’s not a credible explanation, in large part, because as he left the store again, all of this was just people, wrong place, wrong time. So, just as he was leaving the store, a car drove in front of him. And he opened fire on that car, killing a man and badly wounding his wife. That’s not the action of somebody who was sickened by what he did.
And, so, the other thing I think we really learned from this is that he had clearly staked out what he wanted to do. He wasn’t – and he would say this in, in the interrogation a short while later, after he’s taken to police headquarters – he wasn’t sure that he was going to follow through with this, but he did.
And the other thing we learned from the interrogation is that he also told the investigators something different than was in the manifesto. In the manifesto, he’s making all of these racist claims and saying he was doing it to stop the Hispanic invasion of Texas. But he tells the two police detectives, who were both Hispanic, that he did it because he had been bullied by Mexicans in high school. My takeaway from that is he is a person who will alter his story to his audience to tell them what he thinks they want to hear. So, when he’s writing to an audience of white supremacists, he’s giving these racist reasons. When he’s talking to two Hispanic police officers, he’s giving another reason that he thinks they may be more sympathetic to.
Diego: So, a question on the manifesto, Bob, that I haven’t seen people discuss elsewhere really is that his defense lawyer has suggested Crusius didn’t really have the capacity to write that manifest himself. Is that true?
Bob: So, it is worth noting that, in his interrogation with police, he said he was on the autism spectrum. He also described having violent thoughts. And, so, I kind of acknowledged his mental health issues and that became more clear as the investigation unfolded.
So, there is this question about did he really have the capacity to write this thing? Which was, I mean, it’s racist, it’s full of conspiracy theories that don’t have any basis in fact. But, as a structure of writing, it is – it’s not the rantings of a lunatic. It’s well-structured. So there is this question: Did Patrick Crusius have the capacity to write a document like that?
It’s about 2,300 words, so pretty extensive. He tells the police investigators – and this is borne out in later forensic analysis – that he began writing this at the library in Allen that he would go to, that he was using their computers to write it. Joe Spencer, his defense attorney, has speculated, and I’m not sure there’s any forensic analysis to back this up because we haven’t seen it yet, but he’s speculated that a lot of this was copy-pasting from other documents.
So, we know that there is forensic evidence that he began writing this at the library and we know from forensic evidence that he did place the phone on a thumb drive, or place the document on a thumb drive. Also had it on his phone, and it was from his phone that he uploaded it to 8Chan. And you’re able to upload things to that kind of site anonymously. He didn’t have to identify himself or anything like that.
Diego: Did you learn anything else from the interview? Or, I guess, the interrogation with police? And curious if you had any thoughts on the way that they handled that just hours after this carnage?
Bob:Yeah. So, I’ve seen on social media some criticism of the police officers going too easy on him and yeah, it’s easy for all of us to be Monday morning quarterbacks and say “If I had been there, I would have done things differently.” And I also think most of us watch way too much TV crime dramas, so, life doesn’t operate that way.
So, what I would look at is the outcome of the interrogation and within a couple of hours of the act being committed, the suspect confessed to doing it, told police where they could find key evidence, told them that he had acted alone. So, very quickly, in the first few hours, they had a lot of information from him from this interrogation. They did treat him respectfully. I wouldn’t call it kindly or anything like that. They offered him water. They offered him breaks.
And there were two cops in there, but despite what you may see on television, there is no good cop, bad cop routine. They were just trying to get information out of him. So, it was an effective interrogation from that viewpoint. We also do know that the FBI conducted a subsequent interrogation later that afternoon. That recording has not come out yet. I did file a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI and at this point they’ve declined it, saying that I haven’t proved that the public interest in this outweighs the privacy interest. Which is kind of a stupid statement in my view, but I’m going to try to appeal that.
Diego: Yeah. And so, I wonder, Bob, what would you say to somebody who says releasing this information, or focusing on this information is maybe picking an old wound, right? And that we should just sort of move on, and allow the community to heal and so forth. I’m just curious what you would tell somebody who said that to you, and if you can just kind of talk about the journalistic judgment here?
Bob: I would tell them I could see why they feel that way, and I think it’s a perfectly reasonable approach to this. This was El Paso’s darkest day. It’s been going on for six years. And people aren’t saying, “We want to forget the victims” or anything like that. I think it’s quite the opposite. They want the focus to be on those who sacrificed so much. And they don’t want the focus being on the gunman.
And I get that and, trust me, I have no desire to watch the videos I had to watch to do this story. And I don’t want anybody else to see those videos. I did think quite a bit as I was watching it of what the impact on jurors would have been seeing this in open court and the families also sitting there. So, I understand that and I’ve had friends of mine who’ve told me “I didn’t read your story. I didn’t want to read it.” And I’m like, “I’m with you on that.” That’s fine.
But in our conversations with the editorial leadership, Cindy Ramirez and Pablo Villa on the editorial side, and Angela Saavedra and Brandy Ruiz on the audience side, we kind of weighed what we needed to share that was in the public interest that could advance understanding for those who want to find out more while also trying to balance the privacy interests of the family.
The last thing I ever want to do is retraumatize someone. And, as I said in a column I wrote accompanying this, there’s no magic formula for that. But I do think that there is a public interest in answering some of the questions that have not been answered, and unfortunately, some of them may never have been answered.
One of the most important questions that I’ve been pursuing since 2023 is why did the federal government not seek the death penalty? They have never said that. And, as a matter of fact, it was the Justice Department when I was pushing them, who said, “Well, why don’t you just file to unseal the records?” And, like, alright, I will. And, so, that was in 2023, and just in the last month, Judge Guaderrama, who’s been overseeing the case, granted El Paso Matters the right to intervene in this case for the purposes of arguing that a lot of records that the court holds that are still under seal should be made public.
Judge Guaderrama has made it pretty clear in court that he is sympathetic to our argument and wants to release as much as he can. But, at the end of the day, I honestly don’t know if that Justice Department decision is even in the sealed files. But I do think the people of El Paso and the people of the United States have a right to know why the federal government made that decision. Especially because of a number of illuminating factors. One, this is the deadliest attack targeting Hispanics in the history of this country. This was an act of domestic terror. There have been other cases where the Biden Justice Department on racially motivated attacks against either white people or Black people continue to pursue the death penalty.
The most notable comparison is probably the horrible attack on a grocery store by white supremacists in Buffalo, New York, that killed a number of Black victims. The Justice Department decided to pursue the death penalty in that case. There are people in El Paso who feel, with understandable reason, that Mexican or Hispanic lives mean less to the government than other lives. Do I think that’s why they made that decision? I doubt it. But as long as they keep things secret, those kinds of thoughts will apply. And I think it’s incumbent upon the media to continue to pursue those answers.
Diego: Yeah. And I appreciate that and the recognition of the differing views on this about whether to continue releasing information or pursuing new information. And I think we heard that in the victim impact statements several months ago when we heard family members of the victims, some offering forgiveness of Crusius and essentially wanting to sort of move on, and others having a different view on that and whether it was appropriate to move on and kind of still having some sort of anger or hate in their heart, I guess, towards Crusius, which is, obviously, understandable. So, yeah, I think the differing views on this still exist in the community. But I appreciate your answer on that.
Just last thing here Bob, you kind of alluded to this, but do you expect more information to come out about the August 3rd, 2019, shooting or anything additional to be revealed going forward?
Bob: Yeah, I’m sure there will be. After we obtained the records from the YouTube channel Interrogation Files, I think most of the El Paso TV stations saw we’d done that. They reached out to them and also got them. Some of them shared some video that I would not have shared. Those are editorial decisions to be made. And I think other media are largely motivated by the same motivation that I have, which is to try to get relevant information out to the public. So, people will continue to pursue that.
One of the things that James Montoya, the district attorney, said at the press conference in March when he announced that he wasn’t going to seek the death penalty, is that a lot of family members had told him that their biggest nightmare is the deaths of their loved ones being replayed on video on the internet. I am worried about that. The DPS, in addition to releasing very graphic video of people being killed, also released about 600 crime scene photos that are extraordinarily graphic, and it’s extraordinarily invasive. And I worry that, in the wrong hands, what can happen with those.
So, hopefully common sense prevails and people are cautious. And we are, as I said, right at the sixth anniversary of the mass shooting, my thoughts are always with the 23 people who lost their lives, the hundreds of people in those extended families, the 22 people whose lives were forever altered by being wounded there, all of their relatives. As a community, we have sort of wrapped them in our embrace. We need to continue to do that.
Diego: Yeah, it’s been six long years of you following this really closely, Bob. So, we appreciate your coverage and thanks for kind of laying out your thinking and kind of the journalistic judgment on how you handled this.
Bob: Yeah. And as I said in the column I wrote, I’m happy to have feedback. I want to know what people think that we’re getting right and what we could do better with. So, my email address for everybody is bmoore@elpasomatters.org. Let us know how we’re doing.
Diego: Thanks for joining me, Bob, and we’ll have you on again soon.
Bob: Thanks so much.
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