El Paso mall shooting: At least 15 dead, 1 in custody

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A law enforcement official says at least 15 people were killed in the attack at an El Paso shopping center and that the suspect who was taken into custody is 21-year-old Patrick Crusius.

The official was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The official also stresses that the death count is preliminary and that the investigation is still ongoing.

Police say most of the victims of Saturday's attack appear to have been at a Walmart near the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso, though they say the mall had also been "secured."

El Paso hospital say they are treating 22 victims, not including a patient who died after arriving at one of the hospitals.

Speaking to reporters, El Paso police Sgt. Robert Gomez said there likely would be more deaths to report later, but he could not yet confirm them. He said most of the shootings happened at a Walmart at the shopping complex and that the store was at capacity with as many as 3,000 people during the busy back-to-school shopping season.

Ryan Mielke, a spokesman for University Medical Center of El Paso, said 12 people were brought to the hospital with injuries, including one that died. Two of the injured were children who were being transferred to El Paso Children's Hospital, he said. He declined to provide additional details on the victims.

Eleven other victims were being treated at Del Sol Medical Center, according to hospital spokesman Victor Guerrero. He said those victims ages ranged from 35 to 82.

Quezada said she saw four men, dressed in black, moving together firing guns indiscriminately. Police confirmed only one gunman.

Police said by midafternoon that a suspect was in custody and the public was no longer in danger. Gomez said the suspect, who used a rifle, was arrested without incident. Police believe he was the "sole shooter" but are continuing to investigate reports that others were involved.

White House staff said President Donald Trump was briefed on the shooting and spoke about it with Attorney General William Barr and Gov. Abbott. "Reports are very bad, many killed," the president tweeted.

Presidential candidate and former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke appeared a bit shaken as he appeared at a candidate forum Saturday in Las Vegas shortly after news of the shooting in his hometown was reported.

I wonder if this shooting will be blamed on autism like the other shootings. We are not Hitlers.

Hey Mr. CockneyRebel, just out of interest, you may not know but Pete Townsend's brother has Autism Spectrum Disorder. and has been known to play with the Who over the years.

Also, the infamous and arguably my favourite rock opera "Tommy" was inspired greatly by his brother. I
Just out of interest. I feel a bit like Tommy in a lot of ways, although i am not death dumb or blind.
Quiet the opposite. i used to be a bit of a pinball wizard in my teenage years. Pin ball being a bit of a trend during
the early mod years...

“It all began with a poem,” Townshend begins simply. “I had been a recent inductee to the teachings of the Indian master Meher Baba and he led me to the poems of Hermann Hesse. I started to write about a young seeker. I made him a deaf, dumb and blind boy, because we are all deaf, dumb and blind until we discover our spiritual side.

“I called the story Amazing Journey,” he says, which is also the name of the pivotal song from the rock opera that would change Townshend’s life.

He talks about the topic in a broader sense at first but would bring it very close to home later.

“You have to understand what it was like for my generation, the one that came right after the Second World War (Townshend was born in 1945). In the immediate aftermath of the war, the value of the child had changed. I don’t think we were considered to be particularly important. We all felt disenfranchised. Our parents were worried about living under the shadow of the bomb and dealing with postwar austerity.”

Townshend took all those feelings, as well as the core of the spiritual search he had touched on in his poem and started writing.

“I had a real mentor in Kit. Without him, Tommy would have just been a rock album with a kind of story underneath. He helped me make it make sense.”

So Townshend sent his deaf, dumb and blind boy on an amazing journey where “he’d be the experiment for everyone’s darker side,” with images and characters he plucked from his subconscious: the nurturing yet destroying Acid Queen, the malevolent Cousin Kevin and, most significantly, the child-abusing Uncle Ernie.

The concept of Tommy being a “pinball wizard” and acquiring worldwide fame because of his skill at those flashing machines may seem integral to the work now, but it was added at the 11th hour.

Nik Cohn, then the rock critic for The Observer, heard an early mix of Tommy and had some reservations.

“It’s a bit po-faced, all this spiritualism,” Townshend recounts him saying of that version, in which Tommy became a rock star. “You need something to make it more fun.”

Cohn had been telling Townshend about “a tough little 16-year-old girl who was a pinball hustler,” and suddenly Townshend decided to make his hero “a pinball champion, gathering disciples and taking over the world.”

He wrote the now famous anthem, “Pinball Wizard” and “wrote all the other pinball references into the story sideways.”

“It worked. It made the whole story lighter, but it also made it more accessible and that allowed me to go deeper. Suddenly there was this sense that pinball was about the universe and an autistic, Asperger’s-afflicted, deaf, dumb and blind kid could be the key to it all.”

Investigators are examining an unconfirmed screed allegedly posted online by a suspect in custody in today's fatal shooting at a Texas shopping mall an hour prior, multiple senior law enforcement officials say.

A diatribe officials say investigators are “reasonably confident” was posted by the suspect identified by police as a 21-year-old Texas man, Patrick Wood Crusius, on the extremist online forum 8chan hours before the shooting that left at least 20 dead and 40 injured, railed against immigrants in Texas and pushed talking points about preserving European identity in America.

The document is being considered as a "nexus to a potential hate crime," El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said at a press conference.

The writing presented itself as a low-cost, low preparation model for deadly attacks and envisioned the actions as part of a larger ideological war.

The document was deleted from one of 8chan's forums after the shooting began, but forum users archived the post, which contained a link to a PDF version of the anti-immigrant document.

The first reply to the posting was “hello FBI.” Law enforcement was analyzing the document before the shooting began but were unable to verify the author’s identity or potential target in advance.

The note makes early mention of the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shooter, an anti-immigrant white supremacist who left 51 dead in March of this year, citing him as an inspiration. The Christchurch shooter also linked to a livestream of his attack on Facebook, and posted that link to 8chan.

Terrorism experts say that the extremists who don’t know each other in real life are finding each other online and trying to “one up” the attacks.

“I call it ‘cascading terrorism,’” Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told MSNBC.

Although authorities did not publicly confirm his identity or describe the precise contents of the manifesto, a document posted on the website 8chan about an hour-and-a-half before the rampage spoke about the “invasion” of Latino immigrants and said the writer agreed with the shooter who killed worshipers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. That document was posted by an anonymous user who posted another document under the file name “P._Crusius.” That file was taken down, and it is not clear what it contained.

A Twitter account that appeared to belong to Crusius was shut down Saturday evening. Tweets on the account had praised President Trump and, in particular, his effort to build a wall along the U.S- Mexico border.

Television coverage showed police swarming a house identified as that of Crusius in Allen, a mostly white suburb of Dallas about 650 miles east of El Paso.

Local media reported that Crusius briefly attended Liberty High School and went on to graduate from Plano Senior High School. In 2017, he started to attend Collin College, a community college in McKinney, Texas, according to a statement released by the college.

Leigh Ann Locascio, a former neighbor, said Crusius was an extreme loner who always sat alone on the bus in junior high and high school. He spoke negatively of other kids who played sports or joined the school band, she said.

She described Crusius as “very much a loner, very stand-offish” and someone who “didn’t interact a whole lot with anyone.”

Her son, Tony Locascio, walked to school regularly with Crusius and his sister. Tony Locascio said Patrick Crusius only walked ahead or behind them, never interacting and always keeping to himself. He liked animals and kept pet snakes. “He wouldn’t talk to people. No one really knew him,” Tony Locascio said.

Another former classmate, Jacob Wilson, said Crusius was “very strong minded” in class and would try to “take charge” but other kids refused to work with him because he “irritable and had a short temper.” He was often “picked on” because of how he spoke, and because he wore what looked like hand-me-down clothes, Wilson said.

Wilson, who is now 20 and works in his family’s scrap metal recycling business, said he was in English class with Crusius during their senior year, and the taunts from other kids during class seemed relentless. “Every time I looked up in class it was someone new speaking negatively to the kid, ‘Patrick that is dumb, stupid,’” Wilson said.

The attack that claimed the lives of at least 20 people is Patrick Crusius‘ response to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” as noted in a manifesto purported to have been written by the accused El Paso mass shooter. Authorities said they are still investigating to determine to a 100 percent certainty that the file was written by the suspect, who was taken into police custody after the attack on a Walmart in the Texas city.

The unsigned four-page, 2,300-word document, full of typos and grammatical errors, was uploaded to the website 8chan just before the August 3 shooting. As reported first by Matt Keys, the FBI confirmed it was looking into the document and knew the time it was created and uploaded.

Keys also reported out some first images and videos.

According to NBC News, the FBI was aware of the document before the shooting, but investigators were not able to find the target of the attacker fast enough. The document has led to a possible hate crime investigation. Law enforcement sources told ABC News that Crusius told investigators his goal was to kill as many Mexicans as possible.

“Even if other non-immigrant targets would have a greater impact, I can’t bring myself to kill my fellow Americans.” The manifesto writer said he supported the Christchurch shooting citing the “Great Replacement” anti-immigration theory postured there. The writer says that his hatred of immigrants predate Trump so “don’t blame” the president.

“My ideology has not changed for several years. My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president. I putting this here because some people will blame the President or certain presidential candidates for the attack. This is not the case. I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric. The media is infamous for fake news. Their reaction to this attack will likely just confirm that.”

The screed is called “The Inconvenient Truth.” It’s reported to have been authored and uploaded to the internet by the 21-year-old suspect. In it, Crusius says, “My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist.”

The FBI saw the post but not only didn’t have enough time to act, they didn’t know where the attack was set to occur.

The manifesto appeared on 4Chan and 8Chan, was reported to have been posted on Discord and other locations on the internet.

The document reads, “I didn’t spend much time at all preparing for this attack. Maybe a month, probably less. I have do this before I lose my nerve. I figured that an under-prepared attack and a meh manifesto is better than no attack and no manifesto.”

In the four-page document, it’s clear that the writer blames Hispanics in particular for “America rotting from the inside out.” His ideology and socio-political opinions are built upon his issue with immigration.

But he also points to corporate America has bearing much of the blame for the disintegration of the country and takeover of Democrats to make the US a one-party state. He says, “immigration can only be detrimental to the future of America.”

The manifesto writer talks about the arsenal he’ll use in the attack. In a matter-of-fact delivery, he wrote that the gun he’d use, would be the WASR 10. “I realized pretty quickly that this isn’t a great choice since it’s the civilian version of the ak47. It’s not designed to shoot rounds quickly, so it overheats massively after about 100 shots fired in quick succession. I’ll have to use a heat-resistant glove to get around this.”

He then described the bullets he’d use and goes into disturbing and graphic detail about the lethal damage a bullet can do to a body.

But the idea of deporting or murdering all non-white Americans is horrific. Many have been here at least as long as the whites, and have done as much to build our country. The best solution to this for now would be to divide America into a confederacy of territories with at least 1 territory for each race. This physical separation would nearly eliminate race mixing and improve social unity by granting each race self-determination within their respective territory(s).”

He says his “… ideology has not changed for several years. My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president. I putting this here because some people will blame the President…for the attack. This is not the case. ”