Texas law enforcement is investigating a hate-filled manifesto that appeared online shortly before a gunman fired at a supermarket parking lot in El Paso on Saturday.
Police arrested the suspected gunman, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, on Saturday after he allegedly killed 20 people in a mass shooting.
Now they believe he may have published a manifesto raving against a so-called “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen told the Washington Post that the shooting “has a nexus to a hate crime.”
The Post also reported that El Paso Sheriff Richard Wiles denounced in a Facebook post the El Paso shooting as a massacre motivated by white supremacy.
“This Anglo man came here to kill Hispanics,” he wrote. “I’m outraged and you should be too. This entire nation should be outraged. In this day and age, with all the serious issues we face, we are still confronted with people who will kill another for the sole reason of the color of their skin.”
If Crusius is confirmed to be the writer of the new manifesto, he wouldn’t be the first white nationalist to have done so before committing a mass shooting.
Crusius’ alleged screed referenced the manifesto warning of “white genocide” that was penned by the Australian white nationalist who killed 51 people in a series of shootings at several mosques in New Zealand several months ago.
The gunman responsible for the synagogue shooting in Southern California in April also wrote a manifesto praising the New Zealand shootings and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 dead last year.
I’m not a regular consumer of these “manifestos”. I sought this one out for some reason, and I was somewhat surprised. I usually think “angry screed” when I heat “mass shooting manifesto”. It was disturbingly coherent.
Is this common?
From Poetry Magazine this AM, with their daily poem.
A Note from the Editor
On this day 75 years ago, the German Gestapo found 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family, who had been hiding in seclusion for 25 months.
Heard on NPR, if it is the killer’s manifesto, that he absolved Trump of blame, since his anti-immigrant thoughts pre-dated Trump.
Huh? This pea-brain thinks that is a pass for Trump? All Trump supporters pre-dated Trump. Trump just let them out of the box, and encouraged them to “fly, my pretties!”
I think it is less than common, but not exclusionary. People can be psycho and still put words together. And I’m not granting this shooter any insanity leeway.