Tag Archives: Hate Crime

Cornell University and FBI warn Jewish students after online messaging saying “…Jihad is coming”

Cornell-Campus-hate-crime

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘Watch out Jews, jihad is coming’: FBI investigate Cornell University messaging board after vile anti-Semitic threats are made against students
  • The FBI are investigating a Cornell University messaging board after vile anti-Semitic threats were made against Jewish students.
  • The Ithaca, New York-based Ivy institution has already seen anti-Semitic graffiti on its walls and a professor forced to take a leave of absence after calling the attacks ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energizing.’
  • Authorities were investigating at the school’s Center for Jewish Living Sunday night after revolting anti-Jewish threats were discovered online.
  • Of the several messages left on the school’s Greekrank page – a forum meant for fraternity and sorority reviews – were messages with the headlines ‘Eliminate Jewish living from Cornell Campus’ or ‘Israel deserved 10/7.’
  • One member wrote: ‘Watch out Jews, jihad is coming.’
  • Another was even more revolting, writing: ‘I will bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig Jews. Jews are human animals and deserve a pig’s death.’
  • The commenter, who went by username ‘hamas’ and also made threats of sexual violence toward female students, added: ‘Liberation by any means. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’
  • One specific message singled out the Center for Jewish Living, which also includes the school’s Kosher dining hall.

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Massacre in Buffalo planned out attack leaves 10 dead

Matthew 24:12 “And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Buffalo shooter, 18, who killed ten disguised himself as a HOMELESS person to perform reconnaissance on supermarket the day before he carried out massacre – as DA says he’s considering domestic terrorism charges
  • The teenager accused of murdering 10 people in a ‘racist hate crime’ after firing a barrage of 50 shots at a supermarket in upstate New York
  • The store manager claims he came into the store disguised as a homeless person in need of change
  • Police have since confirmed the suspected murderer was actually surveying the store
  • Gendron also admitted he was targeting the black community when he carried out the massacre, police say
  • Previously Buffalo suspect had threatened a school shooting

Read the original article by clicking here.

NYC sees 275% rise in Antisemitic Crimes

Revelations 6:3-4 “When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.”

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘This Violence Has Got to Stop’: Antisemitic Crimes in NYC Spike 275%, NYPD Investigating New Attacks
  • The number of antisemitic crimes has continued to rise after reports that yeshiva school buses were tagged with Swastika graffiti and a Jewish man dressed in Hasidic attire was ambushed from behind, according to Fox News. The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force said it is investigating those latest incidents.
  • The latest attacks have left the city’s Jewish community on “extreme edge,” Scott Richman, regional director of the ADL, said in a statement.
  • “Attacks against visibly identifiable Jews here in New York and New Jersey have become practically a weekly occurrence”
  • “It is becoming normalized, and we simply cannot accept that as the state of affairs. We hope to gather information about these incidents and garner widespread community support to put an end to this violence.”

Read the original article by clicking here.

Three white men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia

By Jonathan Allen and Rich McKay

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (Reuters) – Three white men were convicted of murder on Wednesday for chasing and shooting a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery as he ran in their neighborhood, with a Georgia jury rejecting a self-defense claim in a trial that once again probed America’s divisive issues of race and guns.

The verdict was delivered by the jury, consisting of one Black man and 11 white men and women, after about a two-week trial in the coastal city of Brunswick in a case that hinged on whether the defendants had a right to confront the unarmed 25-year-old avid jogger last year on a hunch he was fleeing a crime.

Gregory McMichael, 65, his son Travis McMichael, 35, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, were charged with murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal intent to commit a felony. They face a minimum sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Jurors reached their verdict on the second day of deliberations.

There was never any dispute that the younger McMichael fired his pump-action shotgun three times at Arbery at close range on Feb. 23, 2020, in the suburban community of Satilla Shores. It was captured on a graphic cellphone video made by Bryan, stoking outrage when it emerged more than two months later and the public learned that none of the three men had been arrested.

Lawyers for the McMichaels argued that the killing was justified after Arbery ran past the McMichaels’ driveway in a neighborhood that had experienced a spate of property thefts. Both McMichaels grabbed their guns and jumped in their pickup truck in pursuit, with Bryan, unarmed, joining moments later.

Prosecutors said the defendants had “assumed the worst” about a Black man out on a Sunday afternoon jog. He was chased by the defendants for about five minutes around the looping streets.

The three men face a federal trial next year on hate-crime charges, accused in an indictment of violating Arbery’s civil rights by embarking on the fatal chase because of his “race and color.”

Some Black Americans used a despairing phrase to describe a case seen as another example of Black people falling under suspicion while innocently doing an everyday activity: “running while Black.” Arbery’s name was added to those invoked in nationwide anti-racism protests in 2020 that erupted after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, both of whom were Black.

The prosecution was widely seen as another test case in how the U.S. justice system handles instances of unarmed Black people killed by white people. During the trial, there was almost no evidence presented or discussion of race as a motive.

The issue of race hung over the trial. A nearly all-white jury was selected, and one of the defense lawyers repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought the removal of Black pastors and civil rights leaders including the Rev. Jesse Jackson from the courtroom.

Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley said he was required to accept the “race-neutral” reasons defense lawyers gave for the removal of all but one potential Black juror. Black activists said it showed again how the justice system was skewed against Black Americans.

CITIZEN’S ARREST

Defense lawyers cited a Georgia law codified during the 19th century U.S. Civil War that allowed anyone to make a citizen’s arrest of someone they have reasonable suspicion is fleeing a serious crime they committed. The law was repealed in the wake of Arbery’s killing.

The elder McMichael’s lawyer, Laura Hogue, told jurors the defendants had a duty to catch Arbery, who she portrayed as a frightening burglar with “long dirty toenails,” using a description from the autopsy report.

Lead prosecutor Linda Dunikoski chided the defense for aiming to “malign the victim,” calling that “offensive.”

No evidence ever emerged connecting Arbery to any Satilla Shore thefts.

Travis McMichael, a former U.S. Coast Guard mechanic and the only defendant to take the witness stand, tearfully testified that he fired in self defense as Arbery grabbed the shotgun he was carrying while chasing him in the truck.

Under cross-examination by a prosecutor, he conceded he told the police hours after the shooting he could not say for sure if Arbery actually grabbed the gun.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Brunswick; Editing by Will Dunham and Cynthia Osterman)

Actor Jussie Smollett due for arraignment in Chicago on hoax charges

By Brendan O’Brien

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett was due in court on Monday for arraignment on renewed felony charges that he made false reports to Chicago police about being attacked in a hate crime he is accused of staging in a bid to advance his career.

Smollett was indicted on Feb. 11 on six counts of disorderly conduct, capping a five-month investigation by a court-appointed special prosecutor who overruled a decision by the state’s attorney’s office last year to dismiss the original case. His arraignment is scheduled for 9 a.m. (1400 GMT) in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago.

The 37-year-old actor, who is black and openly gay, has insisted he told the truth in his account of being accosted on a darkened street in January 2019 by two masked strangers.

According to Smollett, his two assailants threw a noose around his neck and poured chemicals on him while yelling racist and homophobic slurs and expressions of support for President Donald Trump.

Police arrested Smollett a month later, accusing the actor of paying two brothers $3,500 to stage the attack in a hoax aimed at gaining public sympathy and raising his show-business profile.

He was subsequently charged in a 16-count indictment, but the Cook County state’s attorney’s office dropped the charges three weeks later in exchange for Smollett forfeiting his bail without admitting wrongdoing.

The dismissal drew an outcry from then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city’s police superintendent, who branded the reversal a miscarriage of justice, leading a Cook County judge to appoint former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb to review the case.

Webb said he determined that further prosecution of Smollett was warranted, calling into question prosecutors’ judgment in dropping the original case but finding no wrongdoing on their part. Webb said he was continuing his investigation, however, of whether authorities acted improperly in last year’s dismissal.

Smollett’s lawyer, Tina Glandian, has said authorities made the right decision in dropping the charges in the first place, and suggested the special prosecutor’s probe was biased in its use of the same police detectives involved in the original case.

Smollett, who has lost his role as a singer-songwriter in “Empire,” a Fox television hip-hop drama, sued the city of Chicago in November, accusing municipal officials of maliciously prosecuting him.

The city sued Smollett last April seeking to recover the costs incurred in investigating his hate-crime report.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien; Writing by Steve Gorman in Culver City, Calif.; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Accused El Paso mass shooter to face federal hate crime charges: source

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – A Texas man accused of deliberately targeting Mexicans in a shooting spree that killed 22 people at an El Paso Walmart store last year will be charged later Thursday with hate crimes, a source with direct knowledge of the case said.

Patrick Crusius, 21, the suspected shooter, is already facing a capital murder trial and has pled not guilty.

The hate crime charges he will now face will be announced by investigators in Texas on Thursday evening, said a source who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak with the media.

Crusius was indicted last year for the August shooting and has pled not guilty in his capital murder trial in a state court. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

He is accused of driving 11 hours to El Paso from his hometown of Allen, near Dallas, on Aug. 3 and firing at shoppers with an AK-47 rifle inside the Walmart store. He surrendered to officers who confronted him outside.

Crusius confessed while surrendering and told police he was targeting Mexicans, according to an El Paso police affidavit released days after the shooting. Most of those killed were Latinos.

A manifesto believed to have posted online by Crusius on 8chan, a message board often used by extremists, described called the Walmart attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Austin and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bernadette Baum)

Prosecutors charge Hanukkah stabbing suspect with hate crime, citing journals

By Maria Caspani

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Federal prosecutors on Monday filed hate crime charges against a man accused of going on a stabbing rampage during a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home north of New York City, saying the suspect kept journals containing references to Adolf Hitler and “Nazi Culture.”

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed the charges. A day earlier the suspect, Grafton Thomas, was arraigned on five counts of attempted murder in a state court in the town of Ramapo.

Thomas is accused of stabbing five people on Saturday night with what the criminal complaint described as a “machete” after bursting into a Hanukkah celebration that included dozens of people at Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg’s home in Monsey, about 30 miles (48 km) north of New York City. The town is in Rockland County, home to a large Orthodox Jewish community.

The suspect was expected to appear at a federal court in White Plains on Monday afternoon to face five counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs involving an attempt to kill and use of a dangerous weapon resulting in bodily harm.

Handwritten journals confiscated from the suspect’s Greenwood Lake, New York, home contained anti-Semitic sentiments including “referring to ‘Adolf Hitler’ and ‘Nazi culture'” as well as a drawing of a swastika, FBI agent Julie Brown said in the complaint. She said his cell phone was used to search “Why did Hitler hate the Jews” on Nov. 9, Dec. 3, Dec. 7 and Dec. 16.

Brown also said the phone showed searches for Jewish temples in Elizabeth, New Jersey and Staten Island, both on Dec. 18, and for prominent American companies founded by Jews on Dec. 27.

The following day, Dec. 28, the phone was used to access an article headlined “New York City increased police presence in Jewish neighborhoods after Possible Anti-Semitic Attacks. Here’s what’s to know.”

The complaint identifies the victims of Saturday’s attack only by initials. Four of the five people stabbed were released after being treated at a local hospital. One was still hospitalized with a skull fracture, the New York Times quoted officials as saying.

‘SCOURGE OF HATE’

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo denounced “a scourge of hate in this country”.

“Its ignorance is intolerance. But it’s also illegal. And it’s spreading,” Cuomo told CNN a day after he called the stabbing an act of domestic terrorism.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio pointed to a “national crisis of anti-Semitism” in an interview with MSNBC.

Thomas’ family said through his attorney he had a long history of mental illness, no known history of anti-Semitism and no prior convictions.

On Friday, New York City’s police department said it was stepping up patrols in heavily Jewish neighborhoods. Commissioner Dermot Shea told a Sunday news conference the city had seen a 21% increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes this year.

These included an incident last Monday in which a 65-year-old man was reportedly punched and kicked by an assailant yelling an anti-Semitic slur, followed a day later by attacks on two other men in Brooklyn.

“New York is facing a growing problem of #antiSemitic incidents. The pattern is undeniable,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League wrote on Twitter. “The #antiSemitic stabbing in Monsey is the latest horrific attack to shake our community. There is an absolute need for greater action to protect the Jewish community.”

Attacks on synagogues have shaken the Jewish community elsewhere in the country.

On the last day of Passover in April, a gunman killed a rabbi and wounded three people during Sabbath services at Congregation Chabad in Poway, near San Diego.

Six months before that, a gunman killed 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.

(Reporting by Maria Caspani, additional reporting by Barbara Goldbergin New York; editing by Bill Tarrant and David Gregorio)

Special prosecutor to review actor Jussie Smollett’s case: judge

FILE PHOTO: Actor Jussie Smollett appears at a hearing for judge assignment with his attorney Tina Glandian (L), at the Leighton Criminal Court Building in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., March 14, 2019. E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

By Brendan O’Brien

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A judge in Chicago on Friday named a special prosecutor to probe the case involving former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett’s allegation that he was the victim of a racist attack, which authorities have ruled a hoax.

Cook County Judge Michael Toomin appointed former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb to investigate the case.

Smollett, who is black, gay and best known for his role on the Fox Television hip-hop drama “Empire,” told police on Jan. 29 that two masked men threw a noose around his neck and poured chemicals on him while yelling racist and homophobic slurs and expressing support for Republican U.S. President Donald Trump.

Toomin said Webb, who won a conviction of one of former President Ronald Reagan’s advisers for his role in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal and now serves as co-executive chairman of one of Chicago’s largest law firms, was “guided by a strong moral compass and integrity.”

Former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb takes the oath of special prosecutor during a status hearing concerning actor Jussie Smollett at the Leighton Criminal Court building in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. August 23, 2019. Antonio Perez/Pool via REUTERS.

Former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb takes the oath of special prosecutor during a status hearing concerning actor Jussie Smollett at the Leighton Criminal Court building in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. August 23, 2019. Antonio Perez/Pool via REUTERS.

“We are honored to play a role in helping, as Judge Toomin said in a recent order, to restore the public’s confidence in the integrity of our criminal justice system,” Webb said in Cook County Circuit Court on Friday.

Webb said he intends to request a special grand jury to hear evidence on whether any people or offices previously handling the case had committed wrongdoing and whether there are further grounds to prosecute Smollett.

A month after Smollett made the allegation, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx charged him with filing a false police report and accused him of paying $3,500 to two men to stage the attack to generate public sympathy.

Smollett has denied staging the attack.

In March, to the shock and dismay of local politicians and police officials, Foxx’s office dropped the charges, saying an agreement by Smollett to forfeit his $10,000 bond was a just outcome.

Foxx recused herself from the case because of conversations she had about the incident with one of Smollett’s relatives.

Smollett was written out of the final two episodes of “Empire” this season after he was charged with staging the hate crime.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Scott Malone and Paul Simao)

Stopping America’s next hate-crime killers on social media is no easy task

By Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) – The pattern is clear: Hate-filled manifestos posted on websites populated by white supremacists, followed by gun attacks against blacks, Jews, Muslims, or Latin American immigrants.

In some cases, the killers use their internet posts to praise previous attacks by other white nationalists. And after new assaults, the manifestos get passed around, feeding the cycle of propaganda and violence.

Following the racially-motivated attack that killed 22 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, President Donald Trump said he wants police to do more to stop extremists who are active online before they can turn to murder.

But identifying and stopping the extremists who plan to launch an attack is much easier said than done.

Law enforcement experts say that the constitutional right of free speech means police cannot arrest someone simply on the basis of extremist rants online, unless they make a specific threat.

“You couldn’t just open a case on the words,” said Dave Gomez, a retired FBI agent who has worked on cases of both international and domestic terrorism.

“Posting something like that on the internet doesn’t harm anybody,” he said, adding that police can only successfully investigate a white supremacist when you can “connect his words to an overt act.”

The White House will discuss violent extremism online with representatives from a number of internet and technology companies on Friday, according to a White House spokesman.

Social media companies are reluctant to spy on or censor their users, though increasingly they are responding to demands that they take down obvious incitements to violence. And civil rights groups warn that tighter monitoring can lead to unconstitutional abuses of power

Another former FBI agent, who asked not to be identified, said closer monitoring of extremists’ websites would anyway be unlikely to prevent new mass shootings.

“There is not enough manpower. There is not enough technology to properly monitor the internet,” he said. “This is the number one thing we always say in law enforcement: ‘You can’t stop crazy. You can’t even predict crazy.’”

Trump said after the mass shootings last weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, that he would ask the Justice Department to work with local, state and federal agencies as well as social media companies “to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.”

Even before those attacks, The FBI in early July requested bids for a contractor to help it detect national security threats by trawling through social media sites.

“The use of social media platforms by terrorist groups, domestic threats, foreign intelligence services, and criminal organizations to further their illegal activity creates a demonstrated need for tools to properly identify the activity and react appropriately,” the FBI said in its request.

PRESSURE

Top law enforcement and domestic security officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand met with leading social media and internet companies in London last week, and pushed them to help authorities track suspicious users.

The government officials noted in an agenda paper for the meeting that some companies “deliberately design their systems in a way that precludes any form of access to content, even in cases of the most serious crimes.”

“Tech companies should include mechanisms in the design of their encrypted products and services whereby governments, acting with appropriate legal authority, can obtain access to data in a readable and usable format,” the agenda paper said.

A final statement from the meeting said little about encryption, however, and neither company nor government officials talked about what was discussed.

Facebook and Microsoft confirmed they attended but Google, which was invited, did not respond to a request for comment. Other attendees included Roblox, Snap and Twitter, the statement said.

FBI agents say that broad surveillance powers enacted by Congress in the wake of the Sept., 11, 2001 attacks helped them track international terrorist groups and stop people with links to foreign groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State before they could carry out crimes.

But they key law criminalizing “material support” for terrorism does not apply to investigations or prosecutions of domestic terrorists, such as violent white supremacists, that commit hate crimes.

This week, the FBI Agents Association called on Congress to make domestic terrorism a federal crime in order to give agents more tools.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which promotes internet civil liberties, said the sheer amount of users posting aggressive content online makes it almost impossible to identify and track the people who pose an actual threat.

“Even though it seems like there is another mass shooting every week, if you are looking at the number of mass shooters versus the total population, it’s still a tiny, tiny number which means this is still a very rare event,” said Jeremy Gillula, the group’s tech products director. “It’s like trying to predict where lightning is going to strike.”

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Two Texas shooting victims die in hospital, raising death toll to 22

People pray during a vigil a day after a mass shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, U.S. August 4, 2019. REUTERS/Callaghan O'Hare

By Julio-Cesar Chavez

EL PASO, Texas (Reuters) – The death toll rose to 22 people on Monday in a mass shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, increasing with two deaths in a hospital days after a spate of shooting sprees, El Paso Police said on Twitter.

Two weekend gun massacres prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to condemn white supremacy.

Texas prosecutors charged a man with capital murder for the massacre in the heavily Hispanic border city that initially had claimed 20 lives.

Two victims died in the hospital on Monday morning, raising the grim total rose to 22, El Paso Police said on Twitter.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Saturday’s rampage appeared to be a hate crime and federal prosecutors called it domestic terrorism. Police cited a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto posted online shortly before the shooting, which they attributed to the suspect, Patrick Crusius, as evidence that the bloodshed was racially motivated.

A Texas prosecutor said the state will seek the death penalty against Crusius if he is found guilty.

It was the second of three separate public shooting sprees carried out in the United States in the span of a week. The dense cluster of massacres prompted fresh cries of alarm in a country accustomed to reports of young men gunning down strangers.

“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” Trump said from the White House, calling the gunman “wicked” and criticizing blaming the internet and violent video games for fostering violence.

“It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence,” Trump said, a day after Democratic candidates for next year’s presidential election called for stricter gun laws and accused the president of stoking racial tensions.

U.S. gun control advocates have noted that the internet and video games are popular in many other countries where mass shootings are virtually unknown, in part because it is much harder to get a gun than in the United States.

Trump also proposed making it easier and quicker to stop those deemed as having certain forms of mental illness or being a risk to public safety from having guns.

State prosecutors have charged Crusius, a 21-year-old white man, with capital murder, according to the County of El Paso’s state court website. The single murder charge is likely a legal place holder to keep Crusius in custody until further charges can be filed for each of the dead and the wounded.

His grandparents, with whom Crusius had recently been living, said they were devastated by the attack.

“He lived with us in our house in Allen, Texas, while he attended Collin College,” the statement said, read aloud by a family friend to reporters outside the home on Sunday. “He moved out of our house six weeks ago, and has spent a few nights here while we were out of town.”

It was unclear if Crusius has a lawyer or when a bond hearing or other court appearances will occur.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement on Sunday the attack “underscores the continued threat posed by domestic violent extremists and perpetrators of hate crimes.”

The agency said it remains concerned that more U.S.-based extremists could become inspired by these and previous high-profile attacks to engage in similar acts of violence.

The U.S. attorney for the western district of Texas, John Bash, said federal authorities were treating the El Paso massacre as a case of domestic terrorism.

“And we’re going to do what we do to terrorists in this country, which is to deliver swift and certain justice,” he told a news conference on Sunday. He said the attack appeared “to be designed to intimidate a civilian population, to say the least.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray told a congressional panel on July 23 that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the preceding nine months and that most investigations of that kind involve some form of white supremacy.

BACK-TO-BACK SHOOTINGS

The Texas rampage was followed just 13 hours later by another mass shooting, and came a week after a man shot dead three people at a California garlic festival before he was killed by police.

In Dayton, Ohio a gunman in body armor and a mask killed nine people in less than a minute and wounded 27 others in the downtown historic district before he was shot dead by police.

Trump has frequently derided many asylum seekers and other immigrants coming across the U.S. southern border as liars and criminals. At a political rally he held in May, after asking the crowd what could be done about immigrants coming in illegally, Trump smiled and joked after someone in the crowd yelled back: “Shoot them!”

El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said the suspect was cooperating with investigators.

“He basically didn’t hold anything back,” Allen said at Sunday’s news conference, but declined to elaborate.

Police said the suspect opened fire with a rifle on shoppers, many of them bargain-hunting for back-to-school supplies, then surrendered to officers who confronted him outside the store.

Crusius comes from Allen, Texas, a Dallas suburb some 650 miles (1,046 km) east of El Paso, which lies along the Rio Grande across the U.S.-Mexico border from Ciudad Juarez.

A four-page statement posted on 8chan, an online message board often used by extremists and believed to have been written by the suspect, called the Walmart attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

It also expressed support for the gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.

El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, together with the neighboring city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, form a metropolitan border area of some 2.5 million residents constituting the largest bilingual, bi-national population in North America.

(Reporting by Julio-Cesar Chavez in El Paso; Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Jonathan Allen in New York, Keith Coffman in Denver, Tim Reid in Las Vegas, Mark Hosenball in London, Daina Beth Solomon in Mexico City, Daniel Trotta, Barbara Goldberg and Matthew Lavietes in New York and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Frances Kerry and Nick Zieminski)