UPDATE: This story has been updated as the hearing continued.
Towards the end of his sentencing hearing on Monday, Patrick Crusius, 26, stood shackled and stone-faced as he heard from relatives of some of the 23 people he killed in an El Paso Walmart.
They told Crusius how the nightmare of that weekend in 2019 replays itself in their minds.
“Sometimes I try to convince myself that maybe I can go back and remember what we once had, then maybe I’ll be OK once again,” said Yvonne Loya Hernandez, whose mother, Maribel Hernandez, was killed alongside her husband, Leo Campos. “But I can’t. It’s a nightmare that I can’t wake up from.”
Her emotional narrative swayed from details about Hernandez’s life — a fondness for helping stray dogs, her devout Catholic faith and how she traveled to Laredo when Loya Hernandez was battling liver and kidney failure. Then she spoke about the last time she talked to her mother, the night before the shooting.
“We talked about healing, we prayed together. We talked about God,” she said, adding that her mother eventually said she had a long day the next day and needed to rest. “Her last words to me were ‘I love you. Sueña con los angeles. (Dream with the angels.) I swear sometimes I feel like I’m still waiting for her call.”
Loya Hernandez then told Crusius that though she forgave him, he still had to answer to God.
“I pray for you. I pray for your family and for everyone who thinks like you,” she said. “It is not up to me to make you answer for your sins. But no one walks away from answering to God.”
Hours earlier, Crusius pleaded guilty to capital murder and aggravated assault charges. He received life in prison under a plea deal to avoid the death penalty.
He admitted to driving from Allen, a suburb of Dallas, in August 2019 to commit one of the worst mass killings in the state’s history after he was influenced by white supremacist and anti-immigrant hate speech. Crusius, in an online manifesto posted the morning of that attack, said he was trying to ward off the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
He was sentenced by state District Judge Sam Medrano Jr. to life in prison for one count of capital murder of multiple persons and 22 counts of aggravated assault for the nearly two dozen people wounded in the attack.
“Patrick will leave prison only in a coffin on God’s time,” defense attorney Joe Spencer told the court.
Crusius was 21 when he entered an East El Paso Walmart on a Saturday morning, which authorities said he targeted because it was known for catering to Hispanic shoppers from El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, which sits just across the Rio Grande.
“You brought not peace, but hate. You came to inflict terror, to take innocent lives and to shatter a community that had done nothing but stand for kindness, unity and love,” Medrano told a stone-faced, handcuffed Crusius, who donned an orange-and-white striped prison uniform and was surrounded by at least a half-dozen armed officers.
Cruz had already been sentenced to 90 consecutive life sentences in federal court in 2023. But state officials vowed to have Crusius tried in Texas even as federal officials pursued their own case.
Where Crusius will serve out his entire sentence is unclear. El Paso County District Attorney James Montoya said Crusius will initially be taken into the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice because he was arrested by state and local officers.
“Right now the state has primary jurisdiction, however there are legal mechanisms for TDCJ to request that he serve his sentence in the (federal Bureau of Prisons), and also mechanisms for federal authorities to request a transfer,” he said.
Montoya said his decision to take the death penalty off the table came after speaking with some of the victims’ families.
“It became very clear that the vast majority of them want this case over and done with as quickly as possible,” Montoya, a Democrat, said during a press conference last month. Seeking the death penalty, he added, could have prolonged the case for at least three more years.
Victim impact statements will continue Tuesday and could end Wednesday as more than 40 people have signed up to face the gunman.
The conclusion of the state case could bring an element of closure for the families and the community, which are still reeling from the shooting.
Mario Perez, who was shot during the attack but survived, gave a short statement through an interpreter saying that he also forgave Crusius.
“I, Mario Perez, forgive Mr. Patrick. And I leave it all in the hands of God. And I hope that one day he feels sorry for what he did and he asks God for forgiveness. May God forgive him,” his statement read.
Others weren’t as sympathetic. No one who spoke Monday decried that Crusius won’t face Texas’ death chamber. But their capacity for compassion had limits, they said.
“I thank God that I am still alive … and my family is too,” read a statement from survivor Mariscal Olivia Rodriguez. “But I don’t want compassion for the assassin. Because he didn’t have any compassion.” Spencer told the judge and the victims’ families after the sentencing that Crusius sought help for a mental condition that led to delusional thoughts but found none.
“This wasn’t sudden, it was a slow unraveling,” he said. “The political environment of 2019 was charged with incendiary language, terms like ‘invasion’ were used repeatedly in political discourse to describe immigrants.”
Crusius became more susceptible to the hate speech, Spencer added, and the gunman later said he believed he was acting under orders from President Donald Trump himself.
“While Patrick claimed in his manifesto that his views predated the then-president, and that political figures were not to blame, he also explicitly stated the attack was in response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Spencer said. “Indeed, Patrick believed he was acting in the direction of the president at the time.”
Since the attack, community leaders and immigrant rights groups have marked its anniversary at a park just across from where the massacre happened and they often warn that the rhetoric that influenced the gunman is even more prevalent under the administrations of President Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Abbott faced backlash in the shooting’s aftermath after it was discovered his campaign sent out a mailer days before the shooting that urged Texans to “DEFEND” Texas from an increase in illegal immigration. Abbott later said “mistakes were made” but never took admitted responsibility for the language contained in the literature.
Abbott hasn’t shied away from embracing talk about an “invasion” since the shooting and has instead made it a hallmark of the state efforts to secure the border. In 2022, Abbott officially declared an invasion was taking place at the southern border and continues to send more officers and equipment – at a cost to taxpayers of several billions – to repel what he says are violent criminals.
Not to be outdone, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has said immigrants who enter the state without authorization are a plague on the state.
“This is an invasion from third-world countries, they’re coming in here with health issues, they’re uneducated, unemployed and all they do is commit crime on the streets, most of them, many of them,” he told FOX News in 2024.
