The perpetrator of the El Paso shootings will finally plead

The perpetrator of the El Paso shootings will finally plead guilty

A young American man who killed 23 people at a popular Hispanic supermarket in El Paso in 2019 will finally plead guilty in federal court, according to court documents.

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Patrick Crusius, 24, charged with “racist crimes resulting in death,” “reported to the court his intention to plead guilty” a week after prosecutors gave up seeking the death penalty.

A judge has scheduled the hearing for February 8 to formalize his change of strategy and avoid a federal trial.

He still faces a murder trial in the state of Texas, which does not exclude the death penalty.

In early August 2019, Patrick Crusius posted a document containing the white supremacy theses. He denounced a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and praised the perpetrator of the massacre at the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand (51 dead on March 15).

He then drove about 10 hours from the Dallas suburbs, where he lived, to El Paso, a predominantly Hispanic town on the border with Mexico, where he opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at a Walmart hypermarket.

When police arrived, he had gotten out of a vehicle with his hands up and said, “I’m the shooter.”

In police custody, he had admitted wanting to attack “Mexicans”.

23 people died in the slaughter, including eight Mexican nationals and the majority of Hispanics. It had deeply shocked America and opened a debate about responsibility for Republican President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant diatribes.

The El Paso slaughter remains one of the deadliest homicides in United States history, but is regularly punctuated by shootings.