El Paso Strong: August Third, Two Thousand Nineteen

The Cielo Vista Walmart was a Saturday-morning place, the kind of store that draws families doing the week's shopping, grandparents picking up school supplies, people stocking up for a quinceañera or a weekend cookout. On August third, twenty nineteen, it was busy. A twenty-one-year-old man from the Dallas area had driven more than ten hours to reach it. Before he left his car, he posted a document online stating that his attack was a response to what he called the Hispanic invasion of Texas.

Twenty-three people were killed. Twenty-two more were wounded. Among the dead were seven Mexican nationals who had crossed the border that morning to shop in El Paso, as people do in border cities, as people had been doing along this river for four hundred years. Among the dead were an Army veteran named Arturo Benavides, sixty years old. An eighty-six-year-old woman named Angie Englisbee, who lived one mile from the store. Couples shopping together. A grandmother. A man named Guillermo García, thirty-six years old, who survived his initial wounds and died nine months later, becoming the twenty-third victim.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the attack as an act of domestic terrorism and a federal hate crime. In twenty twenty-three, the perpetrator pleaded guilty to ninety federal hate crime and weapons charges and was sentenced to ninety consecutive life sentences. In twenty twenty-five, he pleaded guilty to capital murder in state court and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

El Paso responded with a phrase that appeared on murals and T-shirts and car windows within days of the attack: El Paso Strong. The phrase was true in its way. The city held vigils. The city came together. But community grief is not the same as justice, and a phrase on a mural does not replace the people who are gone.

In August of twenty twenty-four, five years after the attack, a memorial designed by local artist Tino Ortega was dedicated at the site. It features twenty-three names engraved on granite pillars arranged in the shape of a crown. The shape is called a crown of thorns in the artist's statement. It is also, in the iconography of this largely Catholic city, a sign of suffering that precedes something else.