A12 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, AUGUST 5 , 2019
been sitting at a card table for a
fundraiser were both wounded.
One was bleeding heavily after
being shot in t he upper thigh.
Another bystander gave the
man CPR, but Jurado said he
watched him die. He said he had
seen violence w hile in the m ilitary
but n ever a nything of this s cale.
“If you go to war, you know
you’ll be at war and see gunfire,”
he said. “Here, out of the blue ...”
Authorities said Sunday that
they are considering bringing
hate-crime charges against Cru-
sius, with U.S. Attorney John F.
Bash calling it a “domestic terror-
ism” case. President Trump said
Sunday that he thought mental
illness w as to blame for S aturday’s
shooting and an overnight attack
in Ohio that l eft nine p eople d ead.
Jurado spoke to a Washington
Post reporter on Sunday after-
noon as CNN played in the back-
ground. At one point, the news
network showed video of the Wal-
mart parking lot, where Jurado
pointed out his silver pickup, visi-
ble in t he b ackground.
Jurado said that the president
deserved blame for the shooting
and a dded t hat he felt less s afe as a
Latino American since Trump’s
election.
“The way he is motivating peo-
ple and stuff that Mexicans are
‘rapists’ and doing this and that,”
Jurado said, “he’s putting us in a
bad category where people are
going to think b ad about us.”
Jurado said his mother w as s till
shaken up by the experience. He
said he would be getting back to
his usual routines soon enough.
“I guess once I get my truck,” he
said, “we’ll go back to our normal
lives.”
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Hannah Natanson, Eddy Palanzo and
Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this
report.Gunshots struck a wall behind
him a s Jurado felt glass fragments
from a window rain down. Two
women near him fell, h e said.
Jurado, more exposed than his
mother, sat and waited, unsure of
whether the two would be safer
inside the s tore.
“I couldn’t tell whether they
were coming from the outside or
inside,” Jurado said.
After minutes of s hooting — the
steady “pow-pow-pow-pow” o f the
rifle droning on — the Air Force
veteran noticed t he g unshots were
getting louder.
The gunman had circled
through the store, where police
later said he c aused the most casu-
alties, and was now exiting
through the doors where Jurado
and h is mother were h iding.
As the gunman moved toward
the exit, he reloaded his weapon,
while g lancing Jurado’s w ay.
“He looked at m e and I said ‘I’m
a sitting duck here. I couldn’t take
cover nowhere else,’ ” Jurado said.
“I said, ‘Oh, God. This is the end o f
me’ because I was about, I’d say
about five, eight yards away from
him. He would have taken me out
quickly,” he said.
But the shooter didn’t fire the
bullet that easily could have ended
Jurado’s l ife.
“I can’t understand why he
didn’t take that shot when I was
out in the open,” he said. “God
works in mysterious ways.”
Most o f Saturday’s v ictims w ere
hit inside the Walmart, with a
smaller number struck in the
parking lot.
The shooter kept firing after
leaving the store, but then he
abruptly stopped and drove away.
Police officials said Sunday that
they don’t know why.
Crusius was apprehended a
short distance from the Walmart
at 1 1:06 a.m.
After the shooting ended, Jura-
do and his mother came outside
the s tore, where t wo m en who hadthe Walmart — w ith C CTV footage
capturing his a rrival.
As the gunman fired, employ-
ees sought to save customers.
Ta bitha Estrada, 19, who was
working at a GNC vitamins outlet
at the front of the Walmart, told
the El Paso Times that she shep-
herded customers into a locked
room and stayed with them until
the police arrived. Leslie Diaz, a
25-year-old cashier, told the Times
she led customers to the exits as
the g unfire d rew closer.
Jurado and his mother h ad h ur-
ried back into the store when they
saw the parking lot carnage. In t he
entry area between the store’s o ut-
er and inner doors, he moved his
mother in between t wo claw-hand
toy m achines.through. So she called her daugh-
ter i nstead.
“We are just glad she called my
mom,” Fuentes said. “She told her
to stay calm and to wait for emer-
gency services to get there.”
Police say the first call about t he
shooter reached them at 10:
a.m., and they arrived by 10:
a.m., meaning the gunman was on
the m ove f or at l east 15 minutes.
Fuentes said that although her
grandmother was stable on Sun-
day, the family was concerned
about h er g randfather, who was in
critical condition after two surger-
ies — and awaiting a possible
third. “We don’t know what’s go-
ing to happen,” s he said.
After his rampage through the
parking lot, the gunman enteredately to get the d oor o pen.
“You could just see the terror in
her face,” Saenz said. “Thank God
she d id get in. She wasn’t s hot.”
Others were not as fortunate:
Saenz said she saw five a dults shot
as she m ade her escape.
Nicholasa and Juan Velasquez
were among those wounded on
Saturday.
The couple had gone to Wal-
mart to shop and had just parked
when t he shooting began.
Nicholasa Velasquez was shot
in the stomach, near her ribs, and
in her face. Juan Velasquez was
shot in h is side.
As she bled, Nicholasa Velas-
quez tried to call 911, according to
her granddaughter, Daisy Fuent-
es. But Velasquez couldn’t getwould be dead, including seven
Mexican nationals, and dozens
more wounded in the deadliest
mass s hooting in A merica i n near-
ly two years — and the first of two
in a single bloody weekend for a
country where such attacks have
become habitual.
For Robert Jurado, it began as a
regular S aturday. H e had taken his
car to get washed, then ridden
with his 87-year-old mother to the
nearby Walmart for g roceries.
They were coming out of the
store around 10:30 a.m. when they
heard a loud bang, its origin un-
certain. Maybe a car had back-
fired, Jurado recalled thinking.
An older woman politely par-
doned herself as she hurried by
with her shopping cart. Then an-
other bang. And another. The
woman fell to the ground, her
head covered in blood.
There w as a shooter i n the p ark-
ing lot, firing on anyone he en-
countered.
As h e walked, he fired — with n o
expression on h is face.
“He was, like, all calm,” Jurado
said. “He didn’t s how no remorse.”
Around that time, Vanessa
Saenz, 37, pulled up in the Wal-
mart parking lot with her mother
and 1-year-old son to buy the
week’s groceries.
Suddenly, she heard bangs that
she i nitially mistook for fireworks.
She saw a man w ho appeared to b e
“dancing.” She realized, with hor-
ror, that he h ad been shot.
She also saw the shooter who,
she said, appeared to be firing
“randomly.” He was w earing cargo
pants, a black T-shirt and bulky
earmuffs to mute the noise from
the rifle h e wielded.
Saenz made an abrupt U-turn
and s ped as fast as she c ould out of
the parking lot. But there were
children running “everywhere.”
Among them: a little girl who
rushed to a car and tried desper-
SCENE FROM A
such as drug or gun violations,
and many of those cases are
brought in state, not federal,
court, m eaning the general public
often never hears that a domestic
terrorism suspect has been
arrested.
Some law enforcement officials
have argued that Congress should
enact a law that would make
material support for domestic
terrorism a crime. Others say that
such a move could be struck down
by the courts and that current
laws are enough to deliver the
most severe punishments possi-
ble.
In announcing Sunday that
federal officials were considering
filing hate-crime charges against
the accused El Paso gunman, U.S.
Attorney John F. Bash noted that
such charges could carry a death
sentence.
[email protected]shootings and bomb plots, and
yet there’s no political willpower
and everybody seems to be bury-
ing their head in the sand rather
than try to tackle the issue,” J ohn-
son said.
Experts say the way federal
authorities investigate and pros-
ecute terrorism suspects — par-
ticularly domestic terrorism sus-
pects — hides the extent of the
threat.
Under federal law, suspects
plotting support for a group such
as the Islamic State can be
charged with the crime of provid-
ing criminal support to an over-
seas terrorist organization. There
is no corresponding charge for
providing material support to a
domestic terrorism group.
Instead, domestic terrorist sus-
pects who are not accused of a
specific act of violence are typical-
ly charged with other crimes,federal government response
seems to be lacking. People that
we elect seem to lack political
willpower to tackle this issue and
call it out and do something
about it.”
FBI data shows that hate
crimes rose 17 percent in 2017, for
their third consecutive increase,
though officials cautioned that
part of the increase is due to more
police departments providing
data than in previous years. FBI
data on 2018 hate crimes is ex-
pected to be released in Novem-
ber.
Johnson, who wrote a book
called “Hateland” about Ameri-
can extremists, said the govern-
ment has pulled back grant pro-
grams for combating such vio-
lence at a time when they should
have been beefing up such efforts.
“We’re in this heightened state
of activity where we have masswho was not authorized to dis-
cuss the matter and therefore
spoke on the condition of ano-
nymity — disputed those claims,
noting that the FBI assigns re-
sources to reflect its assessment
that domestic terrorists are a
persistent threat. The official also
denied that there is distrust be-
tween the bureau and the Justice
Department, saying the two agen-
cies work closely together.
Daryl Johnson, a former ana-
lyst for the Department of Home-
land Security whose 2009 memo
warning of a growing threat of
domestic terrorism led to a politi-
cal backlash, said elected officials
have been afraid to address the
issue.
“Here we are 10 years later, this
threat is still alive and well and in
some respects is actually grow-
ing. It’s very concerning,” he said.
“I’m still in disbelief that thelaunched against the FBI over the
course of the bureau’s investiga-
tion into Russian election inter-
ference and the president’s
conduct.
“I don’t think there’s any faith
by the FBI right now that the
Justice Department is an inde-
pendent law enforcement organi-
zation,” he said. “I think the FBI is
up to the challenge of investigat-
ing white nationalism and white
supremacy as a domestic terror-
ism threat, they just have to be
allowed to do it.”
A law enforcement official —such cases. The year before that,
about 150 domestic terrorism sus-
pects were arrested.
“Our focus is on the violence,”
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray
said at a congressional hearing
two weeks ago. “We, the FBI, don’t
investigate ideology, no matter
how repugnant.... When it turns
to violence, we’re all over it.”
That p oses particular challeng-
es in the world of white suprema-
cists, who often do not belong to
specific groups but instead find
congregations of similar-minded
people online and feed each oth-
er’s anger and hate.
That general lack of central-
ized groups or leaders among
many white supremacists pre-
sents legal challenges to investi-
gators, according to law enforce-
ment officials. And in some cases,
it shortens the time span from
when a person may adopt extrem-
ist views and when they commit
violence — what terrorism inves-
tigators call the “flash to bang.”
“The current racially motivat-
ed violent extremist threat is de-
centralized and primarily charac-
terized by lone actors,” Michael
McGarrity, a n FBI assistant direc-
tor, told lawmakers at a hearing
in June.
So far, that appears to be the
case for the suspect in El Paso,
who investigators believe wrote a
screed that professed admiration
for white supremacist killers. De-
tectives have not yet found evi-
dence indicating he was part of a
larger group of conspirators,
though they are still investigat-
ing.
Some veteran counterterror-
ism experts said the FBI and the
federal government have done
too little, despite concerns that
have been building for more than
a decade.
Dave Gomez, a former FBI su-
pervisor who oversaw terrorism
cases, said he thinks FBI officials
are wary of pursuing white na-
tionalists aggressively because of
the fierce political debates sur-
rounding the issue.
“I believe Christopher A. Wray
is an honorable man, but I think
in many ways the FBI is ham-
strung in trying to investigate
the white supremacist move-
ment like the old FBI would,”
Gomez said. “ There’s s ome reluc-
tance among agents to bring
forth an investigation that tar-
gets what the president per-
ceives as his base. It’s a no-win
situation for the FBI agent or
supervisor.”
Gomez said that reluctance
stems in large part from the pub-
lic criticism President Trump has
VIOLENCE FROM A
Mass shootings in America
Domestic terror poses specific challenges to FBI
‘He didn’t show no remorse’: Gunfire sends shoppers, families fleeing for cover
JOEL ANGEL JUAREZ/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Armed officers gather Saturday in El Paso. Experts say the way federal authorities investigate and prosecute domestic terrorism suspects hides the extent of the threat.JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A restaurant employee on Sunday looks toward a shopping complex in El Paso, where 20 people were
killed and more than two dozen wounded the day before by a gunman.Th e FBI’s
focus is on
violence, not
ideology,
Director
Christopher A.
Wray has told
lawmakers.