El Paso, Texas: A man armed with a rifle opened fire at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, killing 20 people and wounding 26 others as panicked shoppers and employees scurried for cover before the gunman surrendered to police at the scene, Reuters has reported.
Many shoppers in the busy store were buying back-to-school supplies when they found themselves caught up in the latest mass shooting to rock the United States, just six days after a teenage gunman killed three people at a summer food festival in Northern California, said Wam quoting Reuters.
Saturday’s suspect was officially identified as a 21-year-old white male from Allen, Texas, a Dallas suburb some 650 miles (1,046 km) east of El Paso, which lies along the Rio Grande, across the U.S.-Mexico border from Ciudad Juarez.
Citing law enforcement officials, multiple news media reports named the suspect as Patrick Crusius.
Potential Hate Crime
El Paso police chief Greg Allen said authorities were examining a manifesto from the suspect indicating “there is a potential nexus to a hate crime.” Officials declined to elaborate and said the investigation was continuing.
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said three Mexican nationals were among the dead, and six others were among the wounded.
The carnage ranked as the eighth-deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, after a 1984 shooting in San Ysidro, California, that claimed 21 lives.
Thank you to the @EPPOLICE and all the first responders for once again rushing toward the danger during an extrodinarily large and confusing crime scene in El Paso. pic.twitter.com/W1qTbuEB3G
— Bill Bratton (@CommissBratton) August 3, 2019
“We are going to aggressively prosecute it both as capital murder but also as a hate crime, which is exactly what it appears to be,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott told reporters, adding, “I don’t want to get ahead of the evidence.”
The suspect surrendered to police as officers closed in on him, and he was taken into custody without incident, authorities said.
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