According to court documents, on Monday morning starting at 10:00am, Patrick Wood Crusius will plead guilty to killing 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso on August 3, 2019. This is the culmination of the inconvenient truth that prosecutors, the defense attorneys, the judges and the news media have cooperated in creating a faulty narrative for various reasons – some political and others because the inconvenient truth reveals too much about El Paso.
One of the reasons for the faulty narrative are the two plea agreements that took the death penalty off the table and allowed the public record to remain silent. Because of the plea agreements, the narrative around Patrick Wood Crusius and his killing spree that targeted mostly Mexican citizens and Mexican-Americans remains incomplete, and often distorted.
Some of the perpetrators of the faulty narratives have cooperated unwittingly, likely not knowing they are part of the false narrative and others because it is important to keep a faulty narrative over the facts. For El Paso’s leadership, the more the facts are hidden the easier it is to keep uncomfortable realities out of the community’s narratives.
These include that Mexicans were targeted, not Hispanics as is generally characterized in the false narratives, and that national politics played a part in the killings but not as reported.
Likely the most important thing to keep in mind on Monday, when Crusius pleads guilty to state charges, is that he will not be required to explain his reasons for killing 23 people at the Walmart on August 3, 2019. The complete list of those murdered can be found at the end of this article.
It is important to understand that his motivations and mindset are left open to interpretation leaving the narrative open to distortions. Except for an online screed tied to Crusius and few court documents, the reasons and motivations for the killing of 23 mostly Mexicans is left to news media reports that are often incomplete or distorted.
Driving the distorted narratives are a merry-go-round of district attorneys in El Paso, a judge’s gag-order about the state case that may or may not have been issued for political purposes and a defense attorney whose only “win” in the case was to keep Crusius alive.
For Joe Aurelino Spencer, the defense attorney, the plea agreements provide him the “win” of keeping a killer off death row. With the overwhelming evidence against Crusius, the best that the defense attorney could have hoped for was keeping his client alive. The three prosecutors played a part, likely unwittingly, in the narrative distortion by incompetence, judicial shenanigans or behind the scenes tacit agreements of agreeing to keep the public record silent on what drove Crusius to kill. And the news media played its part by weaving a narrative obfuscating essential details in their reports. The journey to understanding why the Patrick Crusius narrative is faulty begins with the timeline of court hearings.
The Judicial Timeline
Patrick Wood Crusius was indicted twice in state court. The first indictment on September 12, 2019, nine days after the killing spree alleged that Crusius murdered “more than one person,” with a firearm. The first indictment lists 22 individuals that died that day. The second state indictment on June 25, 2020, added Guillermo “Memo” Garcia to the list of the victims. Garcia died months after the shooting. The federal indictment lists the 23 victims using their initials.
The arrest warrant for Crusius dated on August 9, 2019, six days after the murders, charged Crusius with “capital murder.” Capital murder in Texas is the most severe criminal homicide. For capital murder to apply, the murders must be committed during the commission of another felony. Capital murder in Texas, unlike murder, carries with it the penalty of life in prison without the parole or the death penalty.
According to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, since 1999, 339 offenders have been sentenced to death. Most recently, Xavier Davis was sentenced to death after pleading guilty to killing three people on March 24.
According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Death Row Information dashboard there are six El Pasoans on death row. They are Rigoberto Avila, Jr., Facundo Chavez, Irving Davis, Tony Ford, Fabian Hernandez and Fidencio Valdez. Avila murdered a 19-month-old child he was babysitting on February 29, 2000. Chavez killed an El Paso County sheriff’s deputy on March 22, 2019. Davis was ordered to death row for the June 4, 2001, sexual assault and murder of a 16-year-old. Ford was sentenced to death for killing three family members after he robbed them at their home. Hernandez is on death row for killing a 24-year-old male and a 28-year-old female on November 9, 2010. Valdez is on death row for killing another person he was trying to negotiate a drug deal with on December 10, 2010. The six death row inmates show that El Paso prosecutors and juries are not shy about imposing the death sentence, that is, until Patrick Crusius killed 23 people, mostly Mexicans. Likewise, the federal prosecutors have no problem prosecuting death penalty cases, as evidenced by the recent case of Davis. That is, again, until Crusius drove over 600 miles targeting Mexicans for death.
Although the three district attorneys each announced they were seeking the death penalty, Yvonne Rosales and Bill Hicks left office before they could do so. The current district attorney, James Montoya, chose not to pursue the death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea scheduled for Monday.
A fourth district attorney, Jaime Esparza, said he would seek the death penalty but chose not to seek reelection opening the merry-go-round of district attorneys that added to the distorted record around the reasons why Patrick Crusius chose to target Mexican in his killing spree.
The El Paso Prosecutors Merry-Go-Round
In 2020, Yvonne Rosales was elected the first woman District Attorney for El Paso by defeating James Montoya. She took office on January 1, 2021. Jaime Esparza, the outgoing district attorney had decided not to seek reelection a little less than two months before Crusius starting shooting people at the Walmart.
Rosales faced criticism for backlogs and other issues at the district attorney’s office shortly after she assumed office. On January 8, 2022, when judge David Guaderrama set the federal trial case against Crusius for January 8, 2024, Rosales announced that her state prosecution of Crusius would be scheduled in the summer of 2023. Rosales, who was consistent about seeking the death penalty against Crusius, wanted to prosecute him before the federal government.
In response, on July 1, 2022, Sam Medrano, the judge overseeing the state’s prosecution of Crusius, criticized Rosales for announcing the state’s prosecution of Crusius and issued an order silencing the investigators, lawyers and witnesses connected to the case. During the following months, Rosales was criticized for her work at the district attorney’s office culminating on November 21, when county attorney Jo Anne Bernal sought to suspend Rosales from office pending a removal case against her in court. On November 28, 2022, Rosales announced that she would resign from office effective December 15, 2022. Texas Governor Greg Abbott appointed Bill Hicks to replace Rosales. Hicks, like Rosales, said he would seek the death penalty for Crusius. James Montoya defeated Hicks in last year’s election.
Meanwhile, in 2020, Esparza publicly disclosed that he was looking to be appointed as the US Attorney for the Western District by Joe Biden. Esparza was confirmed by the US Senate in December 2022. He was removed by the Trump administration in February 2025.
While Esparza was serving as the US Attorney, federal prosecutors allowed Crusius to plead guilty on a 90-count indictment in return for removing the death penalty. In the plea announcement, the US Department of Justice added that as part of the plea, “Crusius admitted to selecting El Paso, a border city, as his target to dissuade Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants from coming to the United States.”
Recently, federal prosecutors announced they are seeking the death penalty against Luigi Mangoine for killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024. Unlike Crusius, Mangione is accused of killing one individual. It remains possible for Mangoine’s defense team to reach a plea agreement with federal prosecutors where the death penalty is removed.
On July 7, 2023, Crusius was sentenced to 90 consecutive life sentences in prison in federal court. On Monday, it is expected that Crusius will again be sentenced to life in state prison.
Esparza has said that he did not make the decision to remove the death penalty in the federal case. The federal plea agreement closes the federal case against him leaving a public record with little details about what motivated him to kill Mexicans at Walmart that day.
And although Esparza, Rosales, and Hicks all said they would seek the death penalty against Crusius, leaving open the possibility of having a complete public record about Crusius’s reasons and motivations, with Monday’s scheduled plea that hope has ended.
Of the three Democratic candidates running for the district attorney seat last year, Alma Trejo and James Montoya both told the audience at the El Paso Chamber of Commerce candidate forum on January 18, 2024, that they would consider taking the death penalty off the table for Crusius. Nancy Casas, a county employee, was prohibited from answering the question due to Sam Medrano’s gag order he had placed on the case. On a side note, Crusius defense team members contributed to Trejo’s campaign. Montoya went on to win the primary and defeated Hicks in November 2024.
From the onset, defense attorney Joe Spencer said that he and Mark Stevens would “use every breath we have to try and save Patrick’s life.” The problem for the defense attorneys was that the evidence against Crusius was overwhelming. Not only was there video of the incident, but there were also witnesses and the gun used to kill was linked to Crusius. The most damning evidence was telling arresting officers that he was “the shooter” and posting an online manifesto explaining why he drove over 600 miles to kill Mexicans.
With the pending plea on Monday and the federal guilty plea by Crusius, the motives, the assistance, if any, by others and other mitigating facts about the case will not be known because an open court hearing will not be held where the facts would be revealed about the case. Crusius and others involved in the case could offer their interpretations of the motivations but without a public record to back those perspectives they are largely subjective at best.
From the point of justice, the public will not be allowed to examine the full scope of the evidence against Crusius and his motivations behind the targeting of Mexicans. However, one piece of evidence provides information about what motivated Crusius to kill Mexicans, a screed he published online on the day he targeted Mexicans to kill.
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The Inconvenient Truth Manifesto
One of the pieces of evidence against Crusius is The Inconvenient Truth manifesto that Crusius wrote and posted on 8Chan, a defunct White Supremacist website. Crusius’ screed was removed by 8Chan moderators shortly after the shootings. On August 5, two days after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio on August 4, the site was temporarily disabled. According to NBC, officials are “reasonably confident” that the screed was posted by Crusius before he started shooting at the Walmart. The federal indictment against Crusius references the manifesto as a document uploaded by Crusius to the internet.
The five-page manifesto contains six sections: “About Me,” “Political Reasons,” “Economic Reasons,” “Gear,” “Reaction,” and “Personal Reasons and Thoughts.”
A word analysis of the manifesto by the Henry Jackson Society, a United Kingdom based foreign-policy and security think tank found that “countries/country” and “Americans” were the top two words more frequently used in the screed. More than “immigration,” which came in fourth on the most used words. However, the term “Hispanic(s)” was at the bottom of the words used frequency chart with “attack” coming in at the bottom. The word frequency chart with 10 words, puts “Hispanic” at nineth place, above “attack” but below “America,” “even,” “corporations,” “jobs,” and “people.”
According to the Society, the word frequency analysis suggests that the Crusius “manifesto itself can be interpreted as a rally against the perceived excesses of ‘Corporate America’ and, more broadly, the US’s free-market capitalist system,” instead of immigration.
The screed starts out by stating that “in general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.” On March 15, 2019, Australian Brenton Harrison Tarrant murdered 51 people at a New Zealand mosque. Tarrant is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Tarrant’s manifesto, titled The Great Replacement, argues that “white genocide” must be stopped. White Genocide is a White Supremacy argument that the self-styled Aryan race is being displaced by people of color.
Crusius argued in his manifesto that he is “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” Crusius went on to write that “the Hispanic community was not” his target before he read Tarrant’s manifesto.
Crusius then goes on to argue that because of “the increasingly anti-immigrant rhetoric of the right and the ever increasing Hispanic population, America will soon become a one party-state,” adding that the “Democrat party will own America and they know it.” He continues with “the heavy Hispanic population in Texas will make us a Democrat stronghold,” adding, “Democrats are nearly unanimous with their support of immigration while the Republicans are divided over it.” Crusius was not generally supportive of the Republicans, however he wrote that “at least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be generally reduced.”
Under “Economic Reasons” Crusius wrote that “in short, immigration can only be detrimental to the future of America.” He added that “generally, though new migrants do the dirty work, their kids typically don’t,” arguing that “American jobs will be lost.” In essence, Crusius acknowledged the “need to keep replenishing the low-skilled labor pool” but it came with the cost of displacing White college educated workers with migrant children who go to college and compete for the jobs.
Notably, Crusius argues that automation will reduce the dependence on migrant workers as the automation “will eliminate the need for new migrants to fill unskilled jobs.”
Under “Gear,” Crusius goes into detail his choice of the weapon he chose to commit murder and the lethality of the gear he chose for the Walmart attack.
In the section “Reaction,” Crusius begins to explain his reasons for attacking Mexicans in El Paso.
He wrote, an “encouraging sign that the Hispani [sic] population is willing to return to their home countries if given the right incentive,” he argued that the murders would be the “right incentive” to force Hispanics to leave the country. Like most White Supremacists, Crusius does not make a distinction between native-born Hispanics and immigrant Hispanics. He just suggests that Hispanics should leave the country. His focus on migrants replacing American workers is important to keep in mind when we look at what motivated him to kill and how the narrative about his killing spree is distorted today.
As to why he targeted Mexicans, Crusius wrote that “even if other non-immigrant targets would have a greater impact, I can’t bring myself to kill my fellow Americans.” This sentence reenforces the idea that Crusius, although he did not state it in his manifesto was looking to kill Mexicans, not Hispanics as today’s narrative holds.
Crusius then wrote about what would happen to him after the murders. He wrote, “capture in this case is far worse than dying during the shooting because I’ll get the death penalty anyway.” He added that “worse still is that I would live knowing that my family despises me,” adding that “this is why I’m not going to surrender even if I run out of ammo.” He concluded that “if I’m captured, it will be because I was subdued somehow.”
Poignantly, Crusius surrendered to approaching law enforcement by stepping out of his car with his hands up, letting them know he was the shooter before they stopped. Moreover, he is not facing the death penalty in either state or federal charges.
The document does not contain the words “Mexican,” or “Mexico” in it. Nonetheless, it is important to note that most of the victims were either Mexican citizens or Mexican-Americans. Additionally, the complaint affidavit attached to the arrest warrant states that Crusius told El Paso Police Detective Adrian Garcia that Crusius’ targets were “Mexicans.”
Crusius’ manifesto mentions Donald Trump in closing. He wrote that “my opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president.” This was during Trump’s run for his first term. Crusius added, “I am putting this here because some people will blame the President or certain presidential candidates for the attack.” Crusius continued, “This is not the case…I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric.”
A good example to consider of why the Crusius narrative is distorted is the March 30, 2025, headline by Bob Moore on El Paso Matters. The headline reads: “Patrick Crusius believed he was fulfilling Trump’s wishes in El Paso attack, his attorney says”.
The headline distorts the narrative by conclusively connecting Trump to Crusius based on what Joe Spencer told Moore without collaboration. Because there is no public record to consult, the public is left to accept that what Moore wrote is fact although it comes from a person with a personal interest in how the narrative about his client is constructed. Other than this self-serving statement, there is no direct evidence tying the murders to Trump with the only evidence, the manifesto, declaring he had nothing to do with it.
This is not to argue that the Trump Administration was not complicit in the murders, just that the narrative pushed by Spencer through El Paso Matters is self-serving and distortive of the record. This will be explored further.
After 2019, the news media largely ignored the manifesto, only mentioning it in passing when they report on the murders.
Today, searching for Crusius’ manifesto is only available after a tedious search for it. Most results are abridged versions of it or excerpts from it are used to offer commentary or support a story about the murders. The complete original manifesto is difficult to find.
Mental Illness Begins The Distorted Record
Like Spencer’s commentary that argues that Crusius was driven by Trump to commit the murders, there is another fundamental argument for Crusius’ motivations that tend to mitigate why he murdered 23 people but remains uncollaborated in the public record. Members of the community are left to glean anecdotal evidence carefully released by the Crusius defense team and alluded to by federal prosecutors – mental illness.
Alluding to mental illness further helps to diminish the targeting of Mexicans for murder because it adds to the narrative that a deranged killer acted on his own to shoot Hispanics, conveniently ignoring the political climate that encouraged the murder of Mexicans by Crusius.
The mental illness tends to excuse the murder of Mexicans by ignoring the political climate that demonizes immigrants and leads to the erroneous narrative that Crusius targeted American Hispanics instead of Mexicans that his own words support. However, it is the news coverage that feeds the falls narrative to the detriment of the Mexicans that were killed that day. It is a narrative that obfuscates that Mexicans were targeted by a deranged killer acting out of mental illness shooting Hispanics.
Most news media coverage of the murders use the term “Hispanics” when describing the victims. Very few of them identify that most of the murdered victims were either Mexican citizens or have a Mexican-American heritage. To understand this, one needs only to look at the coverage by the defacto newspaper of record for El Paso – El Paso Matters.
El Paso Matters Leads The False Narrative About The Motives Of Patrick Crusius
El Paso Matters, through Bob Moore’s coverage furthers obfuscates of the targeting of Mexicans by using phrases such as “killed 23 people and wounded 22 others in an anti-Hispanic attack.” Note the use of Hispanic in Moore’s write up. The use of the label Hispanic is used to further the narrative distortion that Mexicans were targeted for murder that day by Crusius because Hispanics can encompass many heritages and are American citizens as colloquially used.
The US Census Bureau defines Hispanics as individuals that include Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, Puerto Rican and several other countries of origin like the Dominican Republic, Colombian and so on. If someone traces their ethnic origin to Latino of Spanish origin, they are generally considered Hispanic.
Of the 23 people murdered by Crusius, almost 40% were Mexican citizens and many of the other victims can likely draw their ethnic origin to México. Yet, the narrative is that of targeting American Hispanics for murder.
Why is that?
The narrative helps to obfuscate the fact that it was Mexicans being targeted by the killer.
Of the 92 articles El Paso Matters has published about Crusius, only seven, or around 8% include “Mexican” or “Mexico” in the article. When almost 40% of those killed by Crusius were Mexican citizens and most of the rest are from El Paso, a predominantly Mexican-American community, one would expect to find “Mexican” or “Mexican-American” used to describe the victims, instead, the word “Hispanic.”
Of the seven El Paso Matters articles that included Mexican, one was a guest editorial by Karla Romero, the daughter of victim Gloria Irma Márquez, who used the term “Mexican” to write that she is the daughter “of one of the victims of Mexican descent.”
The second article credited to Robert Moore and Priscilla Totiyapungprasert states that the “attack was the deadliest in modern U.S. history targeting Hispanics.” The article added that “most of the hundreds of people in the Walmart that Saturday morning were Hispanic or Mexican nationals doing routine shopping.” The “or Mexican nationals” helps to minimize that it was Mexicans targeted that day, especially when it follows the word Hispanics.
The next article is a 2024 report on the five-year anniversary by Cindy Ramirez where Ramirez discusses Crusius’ manifesto and adds in passing that “those who died ranged in age from 15 to 90 – mothers, fathers, sons and daughters – most living in the United States and some in Mexico.” The phrase, “some in Mexico” implies that Mexicans were killed in passing, instead of being targeted.
Another article by Daniel Perez is about a theater production about the incident. The Acts of Kindness by playwright Gregory Ramos focused on the targeting of Mexicans by Crusius and thus the term “Mexican” was required in the article.
The fifth article was coverage of the victim impact statements delivered by family members of the victims at Crusius’ federal sentencing hearing. One of the speakers, Margaret Juarez, the daughter of Luis Juarez told Crusius that he “drove 10 hours from his home in Allen, Texas, to El Paso because he wanted to kill Mexicans and Hispanics.” She added that “he said he wanted to ‘stop the Hispanic invasion of Texas.’”
In the sixth article referencing Mexicans, the article states that Crusius “told police and FBI agents that he wanted to ‘dissuade Mexicans and other Hispanics’ from coming to the United States.” The article by Robert Moore and Priscilla Totiyapungprasert added that “most – though not all – of Crusius’ victims were Mexican Americans or Mexicans.”
The last article is an editorial by Debbie Nathan alleging that Crusius’ brother is married to someone from El Paso whose father works in the criminal justice system in the city. According to Nathan, the father implored her not to name him because “we’re afraid that people in El Paso will be so angry that they’ll hurt us.”
Crusius’ five-page manifesto did not use the term “Mexican” and only mentioned “Hispanic” eight times. However, the police affidavit by El Paso Police Detective Adrian Garcia states that he was the shooter and that “his target were Mexicans.”
Although Crusius does not use the term Mexicans in his screed, instead using Hispanic, his focus on migrants taking jobs allows the community to glean his intent of targeting Mexican citizens instead of simply Hispanics. Because facts are limited on the public record because of the plea agreements, the community must rely on Crusius’ words and the evidence available in the scant public record because of the plea agreements.
Why Ignoring That Mexicans Were Targeted Distorts The Crusius Narrative
Patrick Crusius told law enforcement shortly after the shootings that he was targeting Mexicans. This comes from the few public records that exist. Although Crusius does not explicitly state that he was targeting Mexicans in his screed, his use of the terms “Hispanics” and “immigration” follows the same American common misconception of equating Hispanics with immigrants, especially from México.
Because of this, the scant public record clearly lays out that Patrick Wood Crusius was targeting Mexicans – not Hispanics – when he killed 23 people on that day.
The public doesn’t know the motivation behind the creation of the distorted record although it can be speculated what the reasons are for motivating some people to have a record distorted. Most of the distortions are perpetuated by news media too lazy to conduct the proper research or because they rely on government and self-serving statements to report on the issues.
What is known from the scant public record is that Mexicans were targeted by Patrick Crusius for assassination, but that inconvenient fact is often lost in the distorted record by personal self-serving statements, a judiciary unwilling or incapable of creating a public record for the community and an ineffective news media.
List of Patrick Crusius Murdered Victims
(Mexican victims listed alphabetically according to Mexican name alphabetization.)
- Andre Anchondo (24, from El Paso)
- Jordan Anchondo (25, from Odessa, Texas, listed in state indictments as Jamrowski)
- Arturo Benavides, (60, Sun Metro bus driver and Army veteran)
- Leonardo Cipede Campos (41)
- Jorge Calvillo Garcia (61, Mexican citizen from Torreón)
- Guillermo “Memo” Garcia (36, died 9 months later due to injuries)
- Angelina “Angie” Sliva-Englisbee, (86, from Santa Fe, New Mexico, lived in El Paso, name misspelled in state indictment as Sila)
- Maria Muñoz Flores (77, US citizen)
- Raul Estrada Flores (77, US citizen)
- Adolfo Cerros Hernández, (68, Mexican citizen, married to Sara Regalado Monreal, from Aguascalientes)
- Maribel Loya Hernandez (56, partner of Leonardo Cipede Campos)
- Alexander Gerhard Hoffmann (66, German citizen living in Juárez)
- David Johnson, (63, from El Paso)
- Luis Alfonso Juarez (90, naturalized US citizen)
- María Eugenia Legarreta Rothe (Mexican citizen, from Chihuahua)
- Ivan Filiberto Manzano (41, Mexican citizen, from Juárez)
- Gloria Irma Márquez, (61, Mexican citizen, from Juárez)
- Elsa Liboria Mendoza de Márquez (57, Mexican citizen born in Yepomera, Chihuaha and a schoolteacher in Juárez)
- Margie Reckard (63, lived in El Paso)
- Sara Esther Regalado Monreal, (66, Mexican citizen, from Juárez)
- Javier Amir Rodriguez, (15, Clint Independent School District student at Horizon HS)
- Teresa Guerra Sanchez (82, Mexican citizen)
- Juan de Dios Velásquez Chairez (77, naturalized US citizen, born in Zacatecas)
Source Referenced:
Rakib Ehsan and Paul Stott, “Far-Right Terrorist Manifestos: A Critical Analysis,” Centre on Radicalisation & Terrorism, Henry Jackson Society, February 2020.
Right or wrong, I believe that many tend to use Hispanic and Mexican interchangeably. Does Crusius understand the difference?