A6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, AUGUST 5 , 2019
federal authorities in their inves-
tigation of this senseless tragedy,”
President Neil Matkin said in a
statement.
Crusius would often appear
zoned-out during class, according
to a classmate who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because
of the sensitivity of the situation.
During chemistry lab, the class-
mate said, the classmate noticed
that Crusius frequently muttered
to himself.
After his parents divorced and
sold the house in 2018, Allen
police said, Crusius would fre-
quently stay at different locations
throughout the Dallas region, in-
cluding with his grandparents,
his mother and his father.
In the manifesto, the writer
appears to have been inspired by
the alleged writings of the gun-
man who killed 51 Muslims at t wo
mosques in New Zealand earlier
this year, which cited a white
supremacist theory known as
“The Great Replacement.” The
theory holds that elites are work-
ing to destroy the white race by
replacing them with Hispanic im-
migrants and refugees.
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Rachel Chason and Annette Nevins
in Allen, Te x., and Devlin Barrett,
Jennifer Jenkins, Julie Tate, Hailey
Fuchs, Abby Ohlheiser and Yasmeen
Abutaleb in Washington contributed
to this report.kindest, purest people I knew
throughout high school,” accord-
ing to classmate Arielle Raveney,
20, a student at Texas State Uni-
versity. “Which makes it extra
scary to me because that just
shows the hate within Patrick was
self-taught or self-enhanced, that
he definitely went out of his way
to foster that ideology.”
As a student in Plano High
School in 2017, he participated
actively in calculus and law en-
forcement class, finding it “inter-
esting to learn about how the
world of law enforcement works,”
he was quoted as saying in the
cutline of a yearbook photo.
Aryana Barati, a University of
Arkansas junior who sat next to
Crusius in calculus class, remem-
bered him saying “random
things,” getting flustered and eas-
ily agitated, “prompting the
teacher to always say his name in
a concerning tone, like ‘Patrickkk-
kk.. .’ ”
“He was very talkative in math
class,” said Barati. “He would al-
ways ask questions... but he was
definitely an outcast. A lot of
people would make fun of him.
He would say things that would
make people laugh — but they
weren’t laughing with him; they
were laughing at him.”
After graduation, Crusius en-
rolled in Collin College, which he
attended from fall 2017 to spring
of 2019, the college said in a
statement Sunday.
“Collin College is prepared to
cooperate fully with state andfor social interaction through
high school, said Jacob Ames, 20,
who sometimes visited the Cru-
siuses’ house during those years.
Ames was friends with Emily
Crusius — they worked at the
same Cinemark theater in high
school — and occasionally visited
the Crusius home, a brick two-sto-
ry h ouse on a tree-lined street in a
nice neighborhood, where friends
sometimes met before d oing “typ-
ical teenager things,” like shop-
ping at the mall or spending time
at the park.
Ames said Patrick Crusius, who
almost always wore baseball
shorts and a plain T-shirt, did not
like to interact with guests — he
mostly stayed in his room and
stayed quiet. When he did ven-
ture out and pass by Emily Cru-
sius’s friends, he would say hi and
quickly leave.
“He did always seem kind of
off-putting. I can usually tell if
someone is kind of not all there,
and it just seemed like he would
think a lot, a big thinker, in his
head all the time,” Ames said. “He
was reserved and seemed to keep
to himself a lot.”
But Emily Crusius and her
brother seemed to have a good
relationship, Ames said. She nev-
er said anything negative about
him, and Patrick Crusius talked to
her more than to other people.
Ames said he asked Emily Cru-
sius about her brother’s behavior
at least once. She replied that “he
was just quiet.”
Emily “was honestly one of the“He would cover his ears and
really show that he did not like
the sound of that bell,” one class-
mate said.
Dysfunction roiled the home,
according to his father, Bryan, a
licensed therapist who runs a
therapy practice helping patients
recover from trauma and addic-
tion through tools that include
meditation “infused with the
tones of quartz crystal bowls,”
according to his website.
In a 2014 self-published book,
“Life Enthusiasm: A Path to Pur-
pose Beyond Recovery,” t he elder
Crusius described how he and his
wife, Lori, had been essentially
estranged for years before they
divorced in 2011. The elder Cru-
sius wrote that he long abused
drugs and alcohol, including pills
most commonly associated with
attention deficit/hyperactivity
disorder. After the divorce “any
semblance or pretense of stability
crumbled,” he wrote.
The Allen Police Department
said it had three minor contacts
with Patrick Crusius over the
years. He was a passenger on a
bus that had a minor fender bend-
er and once called the police
when he set off his grandparents’
home alarm, police said. Then in
2014, Crusius’s parents reported
him missing, said Sgt. Jon Felty,
an Allen police spokesman. But
within 30 minutes, they called
back to tell police he had returned
home.
Patrick Crusius had a reserved
nature and exhibited a distastehome, she quickly ran inside and
declined to comment.
Jaime Esparza, the El Paso
County district attorney, said the
state has filed capital murder
charges against Crusius.
“We will seek the death penal-
ty,” E sparza said Sunday. “ The loss
of life is so great. We certainly
have never seen this in our com-
munity.... This community is
rocked, shocked and saddened by
what has happened here.”
Meanwhile, the FBI is looking
at a number of possible charges in
the Te xas case, said Emmerson
Buie Jr., the special agent in
charge of the bureau’s El Paso
division, during a news briefing
Sunday.
Crusius grew up in a five-bed-
room, $430,000 brick home with
his twin sister, Emily, and older
brother. At Beverly Elementary
School, other children thought of
Patrick as “the strange one,” said
one classmate, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to protect
their privacy.
He seemed sensitive to sound
and touch, classmates said. In
seventh grade, one of his teachers
would quiet the class by ringing a
bell that made a sharp sound.gunman opened fire outside of a
bar in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine
people, including his sister.
“We are treating [the El Paso
shooting] as a domestic terrorism
case and we’re going to do what
we do to terrorists in this country,
which is deliver swift and certain
justice,” said John F. Bash, the
U.S. attorney for the Western Dis-
trict of Te xas, at a news briefing.
He said the possible charges —
including hate crimes and fire-
arms charges — could carry a
death sentence.
In jail, Crusius has been coop-
erating with investigators and
answering questions, officials
said, though they declined to
detail what he said. No attorney
was listed in court records as of
Sunday; the public defender’s of-
fice did not say whether it had
been appointed to represent him.
“He was forthcoming with in-
formation,” said El Paso Police
Chief Greg Allen. “He basically
didn’t hold anything back.”
Crusius was raised in Allen,
Te x., a predominantly white and
affluent suburb north of Dallas.
His childhood had challenges:
His parents divorced in 2011, and
his father chronicled a fou-
r-decade drug addiction in a self-
published memoir.
On Sunday, Crusius’s parents
and siblings did not return phone
calls or emails seeking comment.
When The Washington Post ap-
proached one relative near her
EL PASO FROM A
Mass shootings in America
Suspect in El Paso slayings recalled as ‘strange,’ ‘o≠-putting’
JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESSA road near an El Paso shopping complex remains blocked off on Sunday, a day after a shooting there. On Sunday, it was still unclear why the suspect made the nearly 10-hour trip from his hometown to El Paso.
In El Paso, on Saturday morning, a gunman fired on customers at a shopping center.
Authorities say they will treat the suspect as a domestic terrorist.
Th is image
provided by
the FBI shows
Patrick
Crusius, the
suspect in the
El Paso
shooting.Sources: Mother Jones; Grant Duwe, author of “Mass Murder in the United States: A History”; Washington Post research KLARA AUERBACH, BONNIE BERKOWITZ, DANIELLE RINDLER AND TIM MEKO/THE WASHINGTON POST
America’s growing mass shooting epidemic
Nearly a third of mass shooting victims have been killed since the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church
shooting on June 17, 2015. In that time, there has been, on average, one shooting every 47 days. Between the
beginning of 2010 and June 16, 2015, there was an average of one mass shooting every 83 days.17 killed at
University of
Te xas Tower32 killed at
Virginia Tech23 killed at
Luby’s restaurant
in Texas1970 1990 2010DETAIL2010 2013 2016 2019Death tolls include victims killed by shooters within a day of the shooting, as well as those injured who later died. Data is from public mass shootings in which four or more people were killed, excluding gang killings, and those that began as robberies or involved only the shooter’s family.
27 killed in Newtown, Conn.20 killed at a
shopping center
in El Paso9 killed at the
Oregon District
in Dayton58 killed at Route 91 Harvest Festival, Las Vegas9 killed at Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Charleston49 killed at Pulse nightclub in Orlando