Patrick Crusius, the Texas man who fatally shot 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso in a targeted attack against people of Mexican descent in 2019, was sentenced on Friday to 90 consecutive life sentences, NBC News reported.
Crusius agreed in February to the back-to-back life sentences when he pleaded guilty to 90 federal counts, including 45 hate crime charges.
The judge asked that he is sent to ADX Florence, a maximum facility prison in Fremont County, Colorado, and requested he receive mental health treatment.
The shooter traveled almost 600 miles from North Texas to El Paso before opening fire on shoppers on Aug. 3, 2019, with a WASR-10 rifle.
Minutes before the attack, he posted a hate-filled racist screed online in which he referred to an “invasion” of immigrants to the United States, the Justice Department said.
The department has said Crusius, who admitted to police he was the shooter, is a self-described white nationalist. During his interrogation, Crusius told authorities that he was targeting “Mexicans”.
The shooter bought the WASR-10, which is a Romanian-made semi-automatic variant of the AK-47 assault rifle, as well as 1,000 rounds of 7.62mm hollow-point ammunition, almost two months before the attack, according to the indictment.
He drove overnight from Allen, which is north of Dallas, to El Paso before opening fire on people who were shopping at the Walmart on a Saturday morning.
In addition to the 23 people who were killed, 22 others were injured. The 23rd victim, Guillermo "Memo" Garcia, was injured and died in a hospital in April 2020, almost nine months after the shooting.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)