A8 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, AUGUST 6 , 2019
mass shootings in america
BY MARIA SACCHETTI
AND SCOTT WILSONel paso — When El Paso County
officials rose to say the Pledge of
Allegiance before their weekly
meeting Monday, black bunting
was draped over the building’s
entrance and the dais inside,
where the commissioners gath-
ered. Mexican and American flags
flew at half-staff. Highway signs
glowed: El Paso Strong.
They had so badly wanted to
celebrate their underdog boys and
girls soccer teams that roared to
championships, El Paso’s long rec-
ord as one of America’s safest plac-
es to live, and the city’s abiding ties
to friends and relatives in nearby
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, despite a
border wall that runs between
them.
El Paso always has lived and
loved in two countries. And now it
grieves that way, too.
Funeral homes in El Paso and
Juarez, the larger sister city long
racked by hundreds of murders a
year, offered free services for the
victims of the shooting massacre
at a shopping center here Satur-
day. Businesses and residents
from across North America have
donated more than $600,000 for
the victims. Mexicans and Ameri-
cans are huddling over the burials,
the medical bills, the prosecution
— the aftermath of what some
people here consider an act of war
on the United States.
“That terrorist act is going to
have emotional and mental conse-
quences,” Eric Pearson, president
and chief executive of the El Paso
Community Foundation, which
set up the relief fund, said at the
county meeting. “Collectively,
we’ve always taken pride in the
idea that we were the safest city in
the country and that we could rise
above all of the fray of vitriol that
has been sent our way from else-
where. I think we were humbly put
in a position where we lost our
innocence on Saturday.”
Engulfed in grief, residents say
they are stunned by reports that
the alleged shooter, Patrick Cru-
sius, harbored such animosity
toward immigrants that he drove
10 hours from his home near Dal-
las to harm them. El Paso, a city of
nearly 700,000 people at the junc-
ture of Texas, New Mexico and the
Mexican state of Chihuahua, is
80 percent Hispanic, and the over-
whelming majority are U.S. citi-
zens.
One in four residents is an im-
migrant, and many of them are
naturalized citizens. It is a com-
munity that often feels misunder-
stood. They live as if the border is
invisible, having breakfast on one
side and dinner on the other.
Here on the border it is normal
for an Irish American soccer coach
named Steve Donnelly to speak
fluent Spanish. It is normal for a
Latina named Felicity Randle, a
17-year-old soccer champ, to speak
no Spanish, because her family
speaks English at home.
What is not normal is what hap-
pened Saturday at a popular Wal-
mart. In a brutal assault that last-
ed minutes, officials said, El Paso
suffered about as many homicides
as the city has in a typical year. As
of Monday, 22 people had died.
El Paso is one of the largest
cities along the southern border,
and its population has always
been predominantly Hispanic, ac-
cording to the Texas State Histori-
cal Association. Many residents
trace their roots to the early 1800s,
when Texas belonged to Mexico —
and when tensions between white
settlers and Mexicans could turn
deadly.
But now Latinos run this coun-
ty, as business leaders, elected offi-
cials, clergy and police. They are
Transportation Security Adminis-
tration agents at the airport,
where signs say “Welcome” and
“Bienvenido” and a monument
stands for the Army’s Fort Bliss
nearby. They are Border Patrol
agents and sheriff ’s deputies, in-
cluding the SWAT team that
rushed to the Walmart on Satur-day.
El Paso has become one of the
major gateways for undocument-
ed immigrants during the past
year, with tens of thousands of
Central American families and un-
accompanied minors surrender-
ing at the border to seek asylum.
The Department of Homeland Se-
curity picked the city to illustrate
that the border was at a “breaking
point,” with dangerously crowded
detention cells and dozens of sick
migrants.
But residents say most immi-
grants stay just a few days once
released, most leaving to join rela-
tives in cities all over the country,
from California to Florida to New
England.
The Walmart where the massa-
cre took place is a sign of the
thriving border community they
leave behind. It is adjacent to the
Cielo Vista Mall, more than 1 mil-
lion square feet of stores and res-
taurants that, at this time of year,
is packed nearly every day with
back-to-school shoppers.
It is the largest mall in the city, a
“super-regional” magnet given its
size and customer base. From the
east and west, Interstate 10 plugs
into it like a power line, bringing
shoppers from across West Texas
and from over the Rio Grande.From the Bridge of the Ameri-
cas and the Ysleta-Zaragoza cross-
ing, shoppers from Juarez can
usually make the trip to Walmart
and the mall in 20 minutes.
And they do — in huge num-
bers.
“I’d heard the shooter wanted to
kill as many Mexicans as he could,”
said Sandra Garcia, 41, a single
mom and 25-year El Paso resident.
“Well, he certainly came to the
right place.”
Garcia shops at the mall, calling
it the “most convenient in the city,
everything is right here.” She often
shops with her children, who
range from 6 to 19 years old, but on
this day they wanted to come for
another reason.
“They had been watching it on
the news all day and wanted to
come by — to say hi to the police
officers, to thank them,” said Gar-
cia, who left Chicago for El Paso,
which she said seemed like “the
safest city in the world.”
The mall is the kind of place
where local soccer teams sell bot-
tles of water and hot dogs to raise
money for the season ahead, as a
few teams were that day. This com-
ing weekend is a sales-tax holiday
in Texas. Those who gathered at
the makeshift shrine the day after
the killings said perhaps the onlyfortunate aspect of the tragedy is
that the shooter did not arrive
during that time, which would
have been busier.
The irony is that the gunman
picked the most American of plac-
es, one characterized by popular
national franchises and a friendly
mix of Mexicans, Americans and
Mexican Americans.
The Hooters next door passed
out water to anyone paying their
respects, as Diana Aitchison and
her husband, Mark, did, dropping
flowers on the widening pile and
placing a lighted candle amid
them.
Diana Aitchison, 44, was born
and raised in El Paso, the daughter
of immigrants from Juarez. The
two sides of the border, and the
two large cities, have been insepa-
rable in her mind, as have the
people on both sides of the river.
Her story is one of the many
filled with “what ifs” that are
coursing through conversation
here and will be for months. She
and her 14-year-old daughter, Alli-
son, had been shopping at Cielo
Vista two days before the massa-
cre, buying clothes for school.
What if they had waited until
Saturday? Allison, who bought a
pair of pants that needed to be
returned, did head toward themall on the morning of the shoot-
ing. Aitchison was listening to the
radio when the music was inter-
rupted with news of an active
shooter there.
She called Allison immediately
and told her to turn around.
“To think my daughter was al-
most there — it breaks my heart,”
said Aitchison, who works for a
telemarketing firm here. “This all
just breaks my heart.”
On Sunday night the candles at
the makeshift memorial glowed
against the backdrop of the glitter-
ing, sprawling city. People kept
coming, dropping off bouquets, a
wooden cross, more candles.
Firefighter Christopher Ter-
razas, 23, and Lillian Gonzalez, 21,
held their poodle-mix dogs, Tito
and Migo, as they stared at the
flickering lights. People they knew
were afraid to go outside. One of
their favorite restaurants closed
temporarily. Her sister nearly can-
celed her nephew’s first birthday
party.
“You really hate us that much?
Just to kill our race? Is that real?”
Gonzalez said, wearing an “I Love
El Paso” T-shirt. “That kind of hate
is in somebody’s heart?”
Mexican Foreign Secretary
Marcelo Ebrard thanked the peo-
ple of El Paso on Monday after
meeting with the mayor and with
wounded Mexican nationals re-
covering in two medical centers.
He sent his “affection” to all U.S.
families suffering in the aftermath
of the shooting, which claimed the
lives of eight Mexican citizens.
“We are friends of the United
States, and we are a binational
community here,” he said at a
news conference at the Mexican
Consulate. “We intend to maintain
this in the future. We are different
cultures, but we must live togeth-
er.”
At the El Paso County commis-
sioner’s meeting Monday, mem-
bers of the Rage FC soccer team
wore matching orange shirts and
cutoff shorts as they lined up to be
recognized for winning the 18-
and-under girls national champi-
onship last month in Tennessee.
But their celebration was muted
amid their horror at the shootings,
which deeply affected another
soccer team, EP Fusion, that had
been setting up to fundraise at the
Walmart on Saturday. At least two
coaches for Fusion underwent
multiple surgeries after sustain-
ing gunshot wounds, a league offi-
cial said. A teenage boy from an-
other team was killed.
“It hurts, like in the heart,” Bian-
ca Chacon, 16, a high school junior
and a Rage co-captain, told the
commissioners. “My next season
is for all the people who died. Our
next season is for them.”
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[email protected]MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST
Valentina Lujan, 5, stares at a makeshift memorial, adorned with U.S. and Mexican flags, outside the Walmart where a mass
shooting took place. “We lost our innocence on Saturday,” said Eric Pearson, head of the El Paso Community Foundation.A city that lives, and grieves, on both sides of the border
CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POSTMurals depicting Latino culture, including the Virgin of Guadalupe, adorn many of the buildings in the Segundo Barrio neighborhood of El Paso. The city’s population is about 80 percent Hispanic.