At 10:39 am, Saturday August 3, the El Paso (Texas) Walmart, located in the Cielo Vista mall complex was packed with clients, mostly doing shopping before the school come-back. At that time, CCTV footage shows how a young man enters in the shop, armed what it seems an AK-47 type rifle, tactical cargo pants, black t-shirt, military-style ear-mufflers and glasses and a cap, and he opens fire over the patrons in what has become the worst active shooting incident in the United States in this 2019 up to the point.: the toll is of 20 dead and 26 injured, some in critical condition although stable. Among the injured, a 4-months child.
The shooter: an early profile based on open sources. The shooter has been identified as Patrick Crusius, from Dallas. Just attending to the clothing, protections and weapons, we may infer that the attack is not random, but it displays some degree of pre-planning, excluding an “amok” scenario and foreseen the odds of a mass casualty event purportedly focused on maximizing the number of victims.
The category to fit the subject in seems blurred, as happened with cases as the New Zealand Christchurch shooter. Crusius has never been in the army nor in the Law Enforcement, so everything points out to a pseudocomando profile: narcissistic, full of rage, with an obsession with weapons and military issues [i]. When doctor Dwayne Fuselier analyzed Eric Harris’ journal, who he defined as psychopathic, he found a great superiority complex, but also cold blood rational calculation[ii]. The journal exudes hatred to human race from a superiority point of view, in a phenomenon present in this pseudocommando category as is “leaking”, bragging about the mass crime he is committing. As we have mentioned, the line between a pseudocomando case and a terrorist one is sometimes blurred, and this is one of those cases: on the one hand, terrorism -in group of individual- tend to rely on secretiveness to protect the attacks of being foiled during preplanning. On the other hand, leaking, although uncommon in terrorism, presents an opportunity to connect different lone actors at the ideological level, establishing a loosely affiliated network of brothers in arms: in this way, Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant and Patrick Crusius have left behind three texts with similar references to white supremacism, against immigration or about the need to clean their own countries.
Crusius’ four-pages manifesto was published at 8chan, the same Deep Web channel where Tarrant published his last March[iii]. Although the main topic is immigration and how it means the destruction of the United States, Crusius also claims against the devaluation of education in a more competitive labor market, where the standard credential is a bachelor’s degree and the increasing prices of university education, while the market is legally opening to both low-skilled and skilled foreign workforce to come to the US, in detriment of young locals. Additionally, he mentions over-exploitation of resources by the big corporations calling immigration as workforce and accelerating consume ratios, as another axis in the destruction of the United States for future generations.
Finally, the manifesto also provides some clarification about weapon selection and planning. He affirms the attack will be carried out with a civilian version of AK-47, which presents the problem of low accuracy and that it heats up from 100 bullets on, with less penetration that the military version, but fragmentation. The second choice is an AR15, although the rounds don’t fragment but tumble, causing lethal injuries. This is the preferred choice, but the CCTV footage show that finally the attack was developed with the AK version. In the same document, he points out the planning took less than a month; however it might be, the fact is that the attack wasn’t random but with a level of sophistication, what reinforces the double choice of a pseudocommando or a lone wolf in a more broad sense due to the somehow political motivation of the attack -causing fear in the Hispanic community-.
Target selection and victims. The target shows the duality of the city specifics and the mall. On the one hand, El Paso represents a border city and one of the main crossing points from Mexico to the US, located in front of Ciudad Juárez, at the other side of the border established in Rio Grande. It is calculated that from the white demographic composition of the city, around the 85% of the total, mostly everyone is Hispanic or of Latin origin.
Bearing in mind that Crusius lives in Allen, a Dallas suburb, he had to drive for about eight hours to cover the more than 650 miles between his hometown and El Paso, reinforcing the idea of planning over random attack. El Paso had been definitely chosen due to racial considerations about the probable victims, omitting other logistical considerations as distance. Crusius didn’t wat to target “Hispanics” but “Hispanics” in one of the Hispanic immigration strongholds in the United States.
The physical target was a Walmart Supercenter, which would fit into the category of soft target. A lightly secured environment where civilians gather with a low perception of threat -they feel safe, and they focus on the activity they are doing, in this case, shopping. As Jennifer Hesterman points out, hard targets repel attacks, whereas soft targets invite, with the consequent psychological impact it has to turn places considered as “safe” into a target: fear spreads and civilians tend to surrender[iv]. Additionally, the timing doesn’t seem random either: Saturday, rush hour -early in the morning in a hot weather, desertic city-, when temperature is cooler than at noon, and in the previous days to the school re-start. Low-income, working and midclass whole families from both sides of the border crowded the building. Walmart sources talk about around 3000 people inside the facilities, many of them fitting the victim profile -Hispanics and Latins-, selected by the shooter in his manifesto, developing one of the activities he also mentions: consume.
The response. The time of response for the incident was of six minutes until the first Law Enforcement units arrived at the scene. Although initially some sources considered the presence of multiple shooters in the area, one in the Walmart and another one -or ones- in the Cielo Vista Mall area at the other side of the parking lot, finally this assessment proved false. Anyway, the huge size of the facilities delayed the “all clear” declaration until it was verified that there were only one shooter and he was taken into custody without incidents. Several agencies apart from the El Paso Police Department cooperated in the incident response, among them the FBI, ATF and Border Police, who add to the response its immediate-response tactical-capability BORTAC unit in the area.
Some points are worthy to highlight. The whole response took less than an hour. Although it is true that the subject didn’t oppose resistance and that he had stopped killing when police arrived, situation was still considered active. During this gap of response, at least we should mention two factors:
1.- Immediate responders. Due to the specific security situation of the area, there were different off-duty law enforcement and militaries at the location of the attack. Some of them, even without their on-duty weapon, help to evacuate bystanders and to organize a primary lockdown in different surrounding shops. In the same way, cashiers and Walmart workers contributed in the same way to place victims at cover. There are no records of immediate responders treatment to injured, but probably the quick action on putting on place a lockdown and facilitating evacuation mitigated the number of casualties.
2.- First responders. The first units
arrived in a gap of six minutes, establishing strike teams to look for the threat
and neutralize it. Minutes later, as more law enforcement started to stage in
the mall and parking lot, some policemen were seen evacuating injured inside
shopping carts to the nearby casualty collection point, a measure that probably
accelerated also the primary pre-hospital assistance and evacuation. During the
joint press conference celebrated in the early evening, the authorities pointed
out that the quick response, although insufficient to prevent the massacre, was
staged thanks to prior and systematic training and coordinated exercises
against active shooting incidents[v].
Less than 24 hours later, a second active shooting incident took place
at Dayton, Ohio, with nine dead and sixteen injured. Officers were on the
vicinity of the incident, which took place at a nightclub, so they could
suppress the threat before the shooter continued his murder spree. Once again, life
or death may be a matter of times of response and of knowing what to do.
[i] According to the classical definition of authors as Dietz or Mullen.
[ii] Cullen, David (2016), Columbine, Ed. Twelve, New York (second Edition, digital version).
[iii] By Sunday August 4, the manifesto was still available at https://media.8ch.net/file_store/7e1363f7757dbaa81b0be29cedfb854dbdd7c3559b1c5afa0e15d63402d39934.pdf
[iv] Hesterman, J. (2019) Hardening Soft Targets. Routledge, second edition. Digital version.
[v] CBS (2019) 20 killed, dozens injured, in El Paso shooting. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/el-paso-walmart-shooting-today-police-confirm-active-shooter-cielo-vista-mall-today-2019-08-03-live-updates/?__twitter_impression=true
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