EL PASO, Texas (El Paso Matters) – A shopper emerges from an aisle in Walmart and looks for someone to help her. The only person around is a 6-foot-tall young man in a black T-shirt, tan cargo pants, black tennis shoes and the beginnings of a goatee, looking at his cellphone while leaning on a display of mini fridges.
As captured on store cameras, she approaches him, says something, and he shrugs as if he doesn’t understand. She appears to laugh, clasps her hands together, then thrusts them upward three times, signaling she needed help getting something out of her reach.
They walk together down the aisle where she had been, and a set of hands is seen on store video reaching to the top shelf. The man walks back to the display area where he had been standing, once again looking at the phone as he settles near another display. The woman heads off in a different direction.
Every day in El Paso, people feel safe in approaching a stranger for a small favor that is quickly granted, momentarily brightening the lives of both.
This was no act of kindness.
It was 9:13 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 3, 2019, at the Walmart next to Cielo Vista Mall. The man in the black T-shirt was 21-year-old Patrick Crusius. On his phone was a manifesto he had recently written vowing to stop the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” which he would soon post to an internet site frequented by white supremacists. (The woman who approached him spoke to Crusius only in Spanish, his attorney, Joe Spencer, told El Paso Matters.)
At 10:38 a.m., just over 80 minutes after retrieving something for the shopper in need, Crusius reentered the Cielo Vista Walmart with a Romanian-made AK-47-style semiautomatic rifle he purchased from the internet weeks earlier. By the time he left the Walmart a final time, 23 people lay dead or dying, another 22 had wounds they would carry for life, and El Paso was changed forever.
New information is becoming public
The basic elements of El Paso’s darkest day are well-established. Crusius has pleaded guilty in both federal and state courts to the deadliest hate-driven attack against Hispanics in U.S. history. He will die in prison.
But because Crusius never faced trial, El Paso knows little about what investigators learned as they tried to piece together the gunman’s motives, and what transpired that day.
State and federal laws generally allow law enforcement and prosecutors to keep secret such evidence before criminal cases conclude. With the criminal cases now ended, some of what investigators learned is being made public.
The Texas Department of Public Safety – which assisted in the investigation – recently released a trove of video and photographs from the Walmart mass shooting investigation to Interrogation Files, an Arkansas-based YouTube channel that specializes in videos of law enforcement questioning of people accused of crimes. Interrogation Files requested the records from DPS under the Texas Public Information Act.
Interrogation Files published a video released by DPS that includes two El Paso police detectives questioning Crusius less than three hours after the shooting. The video released by DPS shows almost two hours of questioning by the detectives. An interrogation by FBI agents later that day was not included in the videos released by DPS.
DPS also provided Interrogation Files with extensive videos from cameras inside and outside the Walmart, as well as crime scene photos by law enforcement. Interrogation Files agreed to share the materials received from DPS with El Paso Matters.
El Paso Matters reviewed the video and images released by DPS and will not publish or describe graphic material. But we are sharing some of what is contained in the evidence to deepen public understanding of the attack.
What new information is in the videos?
The information released by DPS includes two separate videos of El Paso police detectives Fred Hernandez and Adrian Garcia interrogating Crusius on the afternoon of Aug. 3, 2019, hours after the shooting. The first video is about 58 minutes long and the second is 57 minutes.
On the video, Crusius waived his rights to remain silent and have an attorney present for questioning.
DPS also released a 36-minute video produced by the FBI that stitches together recordings from Walmart cameras from the moment that Crusius’ 2012 Honda Civic is first seen approaching the store parking lot until he drives away after the shooting one hour and 46 minutes later.
The store cameras captured Crusius mercilessly gunning down people as he approached the Walmart, as he entered the store, as he moved through, and as he exited.
Before the shooting, Crusius went inside the Walmart and walked around for about 30 minutes, bought a bag of oranges and ate at least one, and sat in his car for almost an hour.
Five minutes before the attack, he drove his car through a sidewalk to reach a parking space on the southwest side of the building. Crusius left two minutes later to seek another parking spot, where he began his assault.
During the interrogation, Crusius gave a different explanation of his motive than he provided in the manifesto he posted online shortly before the shooting. In the manifesto, he highlighted a series of racist beliefs and said his attack was meant to stop “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
What new information is in the videos?
The information released by DPS includes two separate videos of El Paso police detectives Fred Hernandez and Adrian Garcia interrogating Crusius on the afternoon of Aug. 3, 2019, hours after the shooting. The first video is about 58 minutes long and the second is 57 minutes.
On the video, Crusius waived his rights to remain silent and have an attorney present for questioning.
DPS also released a 36-minute video produced by the FBI that stitches together recordings from Walmart cameras from the moment that Crusius’ 2012 Honda Civic is first seen approaching the store parking lot until he drives away after the shooting one hour and 46 minutes later.
The store cameras captured Crusius mercilessly gunning down people as he approached the Walmart, as he entered the store, as he moved through, and as he exited.
Before the shooting, Crusius went inside the Walmart and walked around for about 30 minutes, bought a bag of oranges and ate at least one, and sat in his car for almost an hour.
Five minutes before the attack, he drove his car through a sidewalk to reach a parking space on the southwest side of the building. Crusius left two minutes later to seek another parking spot, where he began his assault.
During the interrogation, Crusius gave a different explanation of his motive than he provided in the manifesto he posted online shortly before the shooting. In the manifesto, he highlighted a series of racist beliefs and said his attack was meant to stop “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
But under questioning by the two El Paso police detectives, he gave another reason for the attack on a store crowded on a Saturday morning with predominantly Hispanic and Mexican shoppers: “I guess I was bullied in high school by Mexicans.”
Crusius repeatedly told the officers that the reasons for his attack could be found in his manifesto, which was a 2,300-word screed that praised a previous white supremacist killer and said immigration was a threat to white people.
But during the interrogation, he also returned to the bullying theme, which was not mentioned in the manifesto.
“That’s the real reason. I rationalize in different ways. That sounds pathetic to say that’s really why I killed a bunch of people. But, yeah, that’s it.”
Crusius was calm throughout the interrogation, but his left leg shook visibly and his statements were often muddled. He confused El Paso and San Antonio at one point.
He said he posted the manifesto, which is replete with racist tropes, because “I just didn’t want people thinking I was a white supremacist. That’s why I posted it, really.”
As Crusius’ criminal cases wound through the courts, his attorneys said he had a lengthy history of mental illness. He told his interrogators that he had long held violent thoughts and said he stopped seeing a therapist because he didn’t think it was working. He also said he was on the autism spectrum.
How he got to the Cielo Vista Walmart
In the interrogation, Crusius said he couldn’t sleep the night of Aug. 2, 2019, so he left his grandparents’ house in the Dallas suburb of Allen, where he was living, and headed for El Paso.
“I mean, I just had violent thoughts, and I’ve been battling them for a long time. Yesterday, I mean, I didn’t think I’d actually do it, but you know, yesterday I started having really violent thoughts and the next day I just drove and did it.”
He brought the AK-47 rifle he had recently purchased, and ammunition he said he had begun accumulating before he bought the gun.
He said he chose to make the 10-hour drive to El Paso because it was far away from the Dallas area, where his parents and grandparents lived. Of El Paso, Crusius said, “I had no idea where it was.” He used a map on his phone to make his way from North Texas.
When he got to El Paso, he got lost in a neighborhood, Crusius told the detectives. He was hungry, so he looked for a Walmart. The Cielo Vista Walmart was the first one listed on his phone search.
During the interrogation, Crusius said he acted alone in the attack.
“I don’t have any friends,” he told Hernandez and Garcia.
At the Walmart
Store security cameras show Crusius’ Honda Civic arriving at about 8:56 a.m. Aug. 3, 2019, and he parked a minute later. (The time stamp of 9:56 a.m. on the Walmart security cameras was an hour later than the actual time in El Paso, the FBI said in the intro to the video it created from store camera footage.) Crusius had been driving for about 10 hours.
He walked into the Walmart at 8:59 a.m. through the grocery entrance. No uniformed security officers are evident in the video. Crusius walked through the store without engaging with store staff or customers. At 9:02 a.m., he went into a restroom at the front of the store and was off camera for 8 minutes and 13 seconds.
When he emerged, he drank from a water fountain for six seconds, then resumed walking through the store.
Crusius seemed to avoid contact with others. While walking in an aisle and looking at his phone, he reversed direction when he looked up and saw two men coming toward him. He proceeded down the next aisle to his right.
Shortly after he reappeared in the camera’s view, a woman pushing a shopping cart can be seen coming behind him, then turning up another aisle.
This was the woman shopper who approached Crusius to seek his assistance reaching something on a top shelf. It was his only interaction with another human being captured on video while he was inside the store.
Crusius walked out of the store at 9:20 a.m. without purchasing anything. He went to his car, opened the door, then closed it without getting in. He walked back to the Walmart, reentering at 9:23 a.m.
He headed to the produce section and picked up a bag of oranges. Crusius used a card to pay at a self-checkout machine, pacing for 15 seconds as the payment was processed. He then exited the store a second time at 9:26 a.m.
Crusius went on and off camera over the next few minutes, but was captured on video eating an orange in the entryway.
He left the Walmart again at 9:30 a.m., carrying the bag of oranges in his left hand. Crusius walked to his car, got in, and sat there for 56 minutes and 10 seconds. Investigators determined that he posted his manifesto from his phone to the internet during this period, at 10:20 a.m.
At 10:28 a.m., a group appeared to unload groceries in the car parked next to Crusius. He drove forward, turned south and then west, and parked for another three minutes in the same aisle.
Crusius then drove forward and turned north toward the store. He then turned west on the road in front of the Walmart before turning north again at the end of the store, driving across a sidewalk near several people and into a parking spot next to a minivan on the west side of the store.
No one, including store security, appeared to have approached Crusius after his reckless move, though the vehicle was largely out of camera view for 35 seconds. It was perhaps the last chance to stop a mass killer before his attack.
Officials with Walmart, which is facing multiple civil suits stemming from the attack, did not respond to questions from El Paso Matters about security at the Cielo Vista store the day of the attack.
Crusius can be seen on store video briefly walking between the driver’s side of his car and the driver’s side of a minivan parked next to him, and put something over his shoulders. Subsequent video would show it was a pouch containing ammunition magazines.
At 10:35 a.m., he pulled forward and turned in front of the Walmart once again. He weaved through the parking lot before pulling into a spot that faced the midpoint of the store just before 10:37 a.m.
He exited the car, popped the trunk, and put on shooting earmuffs before pulling out his rifle.
“I can’t shoot that thing without ear protection, period. It disorientates me. It makes me feel sick,” he told police a few hours later.
At 10:38 a.m., Crusius slammed his trunk shut, put the AK-47 to his shoulder, began walking toward the Walmart, and fatally shot his first victim – a 58-year-old woman who had just turned her shopping cart toward him in the parking lot – 14 seconds after raising his weapon. He headed toward the grocery entrance where minutes earlier he had eaten an orange as shoppers went in and out.
Crusius continued firing inside the store for almost three minutes before exiting a final time and heading back to his car. Hours later, he would tell police he didn’t expect the attack would last as long as it did.
“I thought there would be somebody shooting back.”
He pulled out of the parking space at 10:42 a.m. He later told police he tried to call 911 to surrender after he drove away, but couldn’t get through. He was driving back to the Walmart about 20 minutes after leaving when he saw law enforcement vehicles about a block from the store and surrendered to two Texas Rangers and an El Paso police officer.
When detectives asked him during the interrogation what he planned to do as he drove away after the shooting, Crusius said: “I mean, I just had to get away. I don’t … It was so nasty.”
But even as he walked away from the carnage he left in the Walmart, Crusius fired on a car passing in front of the store, killing a 77-year-old man and wounding his wife. They were his final victims.
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