‘I’m the Shooter’: El Paso Suspect Confessed to Targeting ‘Mexicans,’ Police Say

The suspect in the El Paso, Texas, shooting stepped out of a vehicle with his hands up and declared “I’m the shooter” when he was arrested minutes after the massacre at a Walmart that killed 22 people, police said in an affidavit filed Friday.

The suspect, Patrick W. Crusius, 21, who is white, also divulged to police that he had targeted “Mexicans,” according to the document, written by Detective Adrian Garcia of the El Paso Police Department.

While responding to reports of an active shooter Saturday morning, the document said, rangers with the Texas Department of Public Safety saw a vehicle stop at an intersection near the Walmart. It said a man exited the vehicle and admitted opening fire on customers and employees in the store.

After waiving his Miranda rights, Crusius said he had used an AK-47-style rifle and brought multiple magazines with him from Allen, Texas, to carry out the killings, Garcia wrote. Crusius’ mother had called the Allen Police Department in the weeks before the shooting, asking whether her son was mature enough to handle the rifle he had recently ordered.

Authorities have said that the gunman wrote a four-page manifesto that said he was carrying out the attack in “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Latinos around the United States have said they were deeply shaken by the shooting, the deadliest attack to target Latinos in modern U.S. history.

The suspect is facing a state capital murder charge and is being held without bond. The El Paso prosecutor has vowed to seek the death penalty, and federal prosecutors are considering charging the suspect under hate crime statutes, as well as firearm laws that can carry a death sentence.

In the affidavit, which was written hours after the massacre, Garcia wrote that the suspect had been taken to an interview room, where he agreed to speak with another detective about the shooting. The El Paso police chief, Greg Allen, previously said that Crusius “basically didn’t hold anything back” in interviews with investigators and had told them he drove for 10 to 11 hours from Allen to El Paso. He became lost in the border city and drove to the Walmart because he was hungry, Allen said.

The El Paso killings were one of three shootings in a week that are now being investigated by federal authorities. A gunman in Dayton, Ohio, killed his sibling and eight other people near a bar, rattling the nation less than 12 hours after the El Paso killings and drawing renewed calls for a federal ban on assault rifles.

An FBI agent said the Dayton gunman, who was killed by police, had been exploring “violent ideologies.” Agents also opened a domestic terrorism investigation into a shooting in Gilroy, California, after discovering that the gunman, who killed three people and himself, had made a target list of political and religious organizations.

The El Paso suspect’s court-appointed lawyer, Mark Stevens, has previously declined to comment on the charges. He did not immediately respond to an email Friday about the reported confession.

The magistrate judge presiding over the case, Penny J. Hamilton, on Thursday approved a request from Stevens to appoint a second lawyer, Joe Aureliano Spencer Jr., to represent the suspect.