At least 20 people have been killed after a shooter opened fire at a busy Walmart store packed with families shopping for the new school year in the Texas border city of El Paso, sending panicked shoppers fleeing.
Texas governor Greg Abbott said 20 people had been killed, and more than two dozen more were injured. Mexico’s President Manuel Lopez Obrador said three Mexicans were among the dead and six were among the wounded.
Abbott said it was “one of the deadliest days in Texas history.”
Hours later, on Sunday morning, police said nine people had been killed in a separate mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio.
A suspect in the El Paso case, a 21-year-old white male from Allen, a suburb of Dallas more than 600 miles away, was taken into custody after surrendering to officers. El Paso police chief Greg Allen said a “manifesto” was being investigated in connection with the suspect, and the shooting was being investigated as a potential hate crime.
“Right now we have a manifesto from this individual, that indicates to some degree, it has a nexus to potential hate crime,” Allen said at an evening press conference on Saturday evening, adding that he would not name the suspect. Allen said the suspect had driven the nine-hour journey to El Paso.
El Paso is in western Texas, right on the border with Mexico. The diverse city has around 680,000 residents, and its population is 80% Latino. Its Mexican twin city Ciudad Juárez, sits directly across the large barrier that divides their downtown areas. More than 23,000 pedestrians cross from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso to work every day.
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