El Paso Suspect Had Ordered Gun and Moved Out in Weeks Before Attack

It was one of many moments that family members, former classmates, neighbors and others who crossed paths with the suspect are now scrutinizing as they search for some missed warning sign or omen of the hate-filled massacre that erupted in El Paso after the police say the suspect posted a manifesto online railing against immigrants and “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Two days before the shooting, the suspect had spent time with his twin sister, the family’s lawyer said, and he had been at his grandparents’ suburban home in Allen as late as Friday night, before the police said he made the 10-hour drive to El Paso and started shooting Saturday morning.

“He wasn’t volatile, he wasn’t erratic, he wasn’t isolated,” said the family lawyer, Chris Ayres, referring to the last time the family had seen the suspect.

The suspect grew up in Allen with his twin sister and an older brother. His father, a therapist who specialized in addiction recovery, and his mother, a nurse who also worked at a local high school that Crusius briefly attended, divorced in 2011.

He was more recently living with his grandparents in a different neighborhood in Allen and attending a local college, but the family said he had moved out about six weeks before the shooting. It was unclear where he had been staying.

People who knew him were reluctant to discuss the suspect’s past, saying they did not want to turn the public conversation away from the victims or their concerns about racism, anti-immigrant rhetoric and gun violence in America.

The suspect’s family seemed to share that sentiment.

“Patrick’s actions were apparently influenced and informed by people we do not know, and from ideas and beliefs that we do not accept or condone, in any way,” the family said in a statement. “There will never be a moment for the rest of our lives when we will forget each and every victim of this senseless tragedy.”

Mark Stevens, a lawyer appointed to represent the suspect, declined to answer questions. “The prosecutors say they will try to put Patrick to death,” he said in a statement. “I will use every legal tool available to me to prevent that from happening.”

Neighbors and classmates described the suspect as “strange” and “off.” He was once seen by a neighbor playing outside with an ax. Another neighbor recalled that the suspect often gave terse “yes/no” answers and was often late for school because the clothes he wore did not feel right to him. That neighbor said the family rarely took vacations because the boy struggled being in a car for long periods of time.

As a teenager, he briefly attended Liberty High School in the nearby suburb of Frisco, where his mother taught health science and medical terminology at the time. He later moved to Plano Senior High School, where he is not listed in the yearbook as a member of any club, sport or activity.

As a senior, he took a criminal justice class and enjoyed learning about “how the world of law enforcement works,” according to the yearbook. A former classmate said Crusius had expressed an interest in becoming a police officer, the classmate’s mother said.

To many fellow students, however, he was barely there. Some remembered him as an awkward, solitary presence in the hallways or English class, and said he did not seem to have many — if any — friends in a class of about 1,300 students.

Friends of his sister, whom they described as bubbly, kind and artistic, said they barely knew her brother.

“I honestly didn’t know they were related until senior year,” Amanda McNatt, 21, said. “He wasn’t rude or anything. Just gave off the vibe that he didn’t want to be bothered.”

A high school acquaintance, Shakira, said the suspect was interested in conservative politics and would sometimes get into political arguments. She spoke on the condition that she only be identified by her middle name because she did not want to be publicly linked to an accused mass killer.

Crusius was sometimes part of a small cluster of students who sat outside the library of Plano Senior High School at lunch discussing anime or politics, Shakira said. He sometimes abruptly shifted the conversation, she said, to ask her views about the Second Amendment, white supremacy or police brutality.

“We’d talk about guns because we lived in Texas,” she said. “He couldn’t wait to buy one.”

Shakira, who has African American, Brazilian and Cuban heritage, said the questions did not seem hateful or racist at the time, only odd. “He’s kind of off,” she said. “He’s asking these really weird questions.”

Shakira, 19, was a grade behind the suspect and said they mostly lost touch toward the end of his senior year. She sometimes saw him studying on a grassy campus of nearby Collin College, where school officials said a student named Patrick Crusius attended from fall 2017 through spring 2019. She said she only remembered seeing him alone.

On his now-removed LinkedIn page, the suspect said he was “not really motivated to do anything more than what’s necessary to get by.”

After going to the local college for two years, he moved out of his grandparents’ home and “was trying to decide what he was going to do next,” Ayres, the family lawyer, said. He said he could not say where Crusius had been living, but said the family had not had a falling out and had stayed in regular contact with him.

But there was one development that concerned his mother: Her son had recently ordered a military-style weapon. Her call to the Allen Police Department was first reported by CNN.

“It was an informational call based off of his age, maturity and lack of experience handling a weapon,” said Ayres, who said the police told her that, according to the law, her son was allowed to have the weapon. “It was in no way, shape or form something that was out of concern of him being a threat.”

Sgt. Jon Felty, a spokesman for the Allen Police Department, said the police had found no records of the call from Crusius’ mother, and had done an extensive search of their records and turned up no threats or arrests.

One of the fundamental questions of the shooting is still unanswered: how and when the suspect became radicalized. He said he spent a lot of time on the computer, and a manifesto connected to him appeared on the site 8chan, a go-to resource for violent extremists.

By last weekend, the authorities said, Crusius had made the long drive to El Paso, a border town that is 80% Hispanic. The police said he got lost in the city and stopped at the Walmart because he had been hungry.

As the deaths of 22 people gripped the nation, and were shortly followed by another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, Crusius’ community in Texas encouraged one another via social media not to give the suspect added attention.

“You can refer to the terrorist’s manifesto to receive truthful insight on the reasoning behind this attack,” one former classmate said in a message. “That is the clearest and most informative evidence as to what kind of person would do something like this.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.