El Paso shooter left an anti-immigrant manifesto, backed Christchurch killer

If the post, titled “The inconvenient truth”, is verified to have been written by the alleged shooter Patrick Crusius the shooting will be investigated as a hate crime

US investigators are reviewing an online post left by a 21-year-old man who gunned down 20 people, including three Mexican nationals, at a Walmart store in El Paso, a Texas city along the border with Mexico, in which he raged against “invasion” by Hispanic people and “racial mixing”, and expressed admiration for the Christchurch shooter.

A woman reacts after a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, U.S. August 3, 2019. (REUTERS)

If the post, titled “The inconvenient truth”, is verified to have been written by the alleged shooter Patrick Crusius the shooting will be investigated as a hate crime. “Right now we have a manifesto from this individual, that indicates to some degree, it has a nexus to potential hate crime,” El Paso police chief Greg Allen told reporters.

Watch: 20 killed in Texas shooting, gunman taken into custody

The shooter is a resident of Allen, also in Texas, nine-hour drive from El Paso. He gave himself up to law enforcement officers without incident. Not much else has been disclosed about him other than he has a twin sister and he was called “the strange one” in school, and was described as a quiet person.

“In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” the manifesto says in the opening sentence, referring to Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist who killed 51 people in two separate shootings at a mosque and an Islamic center in Christchurch, New Zealand past March.

“This attack,” the author wrote about the El Paso massacre that he might have been planning at the time, “is a response to Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I m only defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

“Invasion” as a word has been used frequently by President Donald Trump in tweets and remarks about the waves of asylum-seekers from Central American countries headed for the United States. When he declared a national emergency in February to fund a wall along the Mexican border to check undocumented migrants, he had said “we are talking about an invasion of out country”.

And Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that tracks hate groups and extremists, reported tweets bearing the El Paso shooter’s name that had “liked” posts with “BuildTheWall” hashtag one with a photo using guns to spell out “Trump”. That account appeared to have been deleted since.

Increasing incidents of violence by white supremacists has caused concern. “A majority of the domestic terrorism cases we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence,” Christopher Wray said at a congressional hearing in July. Earlier, he had said the threat from white supremacists was “persistent” and “prevalent”.

El Paso was the deadliest mass shooting int he United States since November 2017, when a gunman killed 26 people at a Texas church and game just days after a shooting at a food festival in Gilroy, California that claimed three lives. Questions will be raised about the country’s lax gun laws, but not much is expected to change.

Crusius was carrying an assault-style rifle, but no other details were available, such as when and where he bought it, if it was his own. Witnesses have said he was dressed in black and wore some kind of ear-muffs at the time of the shooting. He wrote about his dress and gear in the manifesto, if he was indeed its author. And his motives and thinking.

“I am against race-mixing because it destroys genetic diversity and creates identity. Also because it’s completely unnecessary and selfish. 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics form inter-racial union at much higher rate than average,” he wrote. “Yet another reason to send them back.”