Lost in Life, El Paso Suspect Found a Dark World Online

He has told investigators that he came to his views by doing research online, according to a law-enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation, and didn’t speak to or organize with other white nationalists in person. He said he read the manifesto by the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand and thought it had the right message.

According to law enforcement, shortly before the attack in El Paso began on Saturday, he posted a manifesto on an online forum called 8chan. The document expressed a desire to kill as many Hispanics as possible, claiming they were culturally replacing native-born Americans and taking away job opportunities.

8chan has long been a home for users who want to discuss mass shootings and racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic and antigay ideologies. Law-enforcement officials are inquiring about the extent to which Mr. Crusius may have become radicalized on sites such as 8chan.

The anonymity of users on the platform makes it hard to determine what else he may have posted, who he communicated with and whether he left any clues to what he was planning.

Mr. Ayres, his family’s lawyer, said the family is baffled by where he picked up some of the ideas contained in the manifesto, which seemed more sophisticated than the way he usually talked. His grandfather, Mr. Ayres said, “never got the impression that Patrick was going to a dark or strange place.”

The public defender representing Mr. Crusius didn’t return calls seeking comment.

After his arrest, Mr. Crusius has spoken at length to authorities. “He basically didn’t hold anything back,” El Paso Chief Greg Allen said. “He expected to die.”

8chan offers forums where racist views and the celebration of mass shooters are unfettered. The site was launched in response to the censoring of certain views on 4chan, another fringe site. The only rule of the forum is that users not post, request or link to any content that is illegal in the U.S.

After the shooting, which killed 22, the owner of the forum, Jim Watkins, defended it in a YouTube video, saying his company was helping law enforcement in its investigation. He said the manifesto may have been written by Mr. Crusius but uploaded by another user.

People who have spent time on the site said they couldn’t recall Mr. Crusius ever previously identifying himself in posts. Few users ever do so, they said.

It appears that he was familiar before Saturday with the forum, which can be difficult for first-time users to navigate. The site is divided into more than 21,000 discussion boards, and the one Mr. Crusius chose, called “politically incorrect,” is the same one used by the gunmen in two other shootings: the April killing of a worshiper at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., and the March killing of 51 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Mr. Crusius appears to have been influenced by previous manifestos on the site. In the first paragraph of his own manifesto, he laid out how New Zealand shooter Brenton Tarrant spurred him to launch his own attack, writing, “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.” In March, Mr. Tarrant allegedly posted a 74-page anti-Muslim manifesto to 8chan before he began shooting. He is often referred to on the site as “St. Tarrant.”

Mr. Crusius appeared to be nervous about how his manifesto and subsequent shooting would be received on the board. “I have do this before I lose my nerve,” he wrote. “I figured that an under-prepared attack and a meh manifesto is better than no attack and no manifesto.”

In the hours after the attack, a discussion broke out on 8chan about his place in the history of mass shooters. Responses were riddled with racist and antigay language. One said, “Every shabbat,” which a regular 8chan user said was an expression of hope that there would be a mass shooting every week.

“The new guys deserves some praise, he reached almost a third of the high score,” one commenter wrote, a reference to the largest death toll in any mass shooting. 8chan users regularly refer to the death count in mass shootings as the “score.”

Others mocked him for failing to kill more people, or for targeting Hispanics instead of Jews.

“Hail all our men of action and martyrs,” wrote one person. “Hail Tarrant, Bowers…Roof, Breivik, and Ernest,” a list of shooters who espoused racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic ideas.

The manifesto went online at 10:15 a.m. local time, about 25 minutes before Mr. Crusius allegedly began his slaughter. There has been no indication that any 8chan users alerted authorities, according to one law-enforcement official. Site administrators eventually removed the manifesto, but it was reposted and mentioned on 8chan and other fringe social media sites more than 750 times, according to Storyful, a social media analytics company. (Storyful is owned by

News Corp
,

the parent company of The Wall Street Journal.) It also was mentioned more than 77,000 times on mainstream social-media sites, including

Facebook
.

The FBI is now turning more attention to violence by white supremacists in the U.S. after nearly two decades in which it primarily focused on overseas Islamic extremism. Domestic terrorists are being radicalized online in much the same way as their overseas counterparts.

While federal law enforcement has wide latitude to crack down on foreign terror plots, the First Amendment complicates investigators’ efforts to thwart attacks by Americans. If white supremacists share hateful comments among themselves on online forums, even if they talk about weapons, the FBI is largely powerless to investigate because both speech and gun ownership are protected rights.

Because Mr. Crusius’s manifesto didn’t include specific plans to carry out a shooting, it isn’t clear whether law enforcement would have taken action even if they had known about it. There regularly are many vague threats of hate-fueled violence on numerous sites across the internet. On 8chan alone, there were 2,370 posts in a single hour on Aug. 5, two days after the shooting.

If someone in the U.S. were communicating with a foreign terrorist overseas about weapons or ideology, U.S. terrorism laws give authorities the ability at least to take a closer look and launch an investigation, if warranted. But federal officials have fewer options when it comes to domestic threats because the U.S. government has no specific statute for acts of domestic terrorism. Prosecutors instead frequently turn to hate-crime or gun-related laws.

“It’s not a question of manpower, it’s really a question of the ability to begin to penetrate that sort of circle,” said Michael Mullaney, who worked as the Justice Department’s counterterrorism chief during the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.

Mr. Crusius grew up comfortable in the majority white suburb of Allen. His parents divorced in 2011, in part because of his father’s drinking and drug use, according to court documents and a memoir published by his father. He attended high school in Plano, where he took a law enforcement course and was part of the 2017 graduating class of more than 1,000.

“He didn’t necessarily have a lot of friends,” said Paige Nunnally-Rowley, who attended Plano Senior High School and Collin College, a nearby community college, with him. “He just shied away from a lot of people, no matter who they were.”

His older brother, Blake, described Mr. Crusius in a 2016 college assignment as a “generally very introverted” person who made some friends through online gaming and chat rooms. “The anonymity and less intimate nature of the internet allow him to connect with others more comfortably and branch out to make new friends,” Blake wrote at the time. Blake said his younger brother also had offline friends, according to Mr. Ayres.

Mr. Crusius’s twin sister, Emily, was more popular, with a large group of high-school friends, said Damarius Griffin, who graduated in 2016.

After finishing high school, Mr. Crusius enrolled at Collin and moved in with his grandparents.

Some postings on a

Twitter

account with his name, which had the handle @outsider609, suggest that his political leanings were to the right, although not out of the mainstream. The movement to build a border wall with Mexico, said one, “is the best way that @POTUS has worked to secure our country so far!”

The manifesto said he spent about a month preparing for the attack. He moved out of his grandparents’ home about six weeks before the shooting. They thought he was about to take the next step in his life, perhaps a transfer to a four-year university, a job, or a military career.

When his mother, Lori, learned he had ordered an AK-style rifle several weeks ago, she called Allen police and was referred to a safety-resource officer to talk through her concerns that her inexperienced son had purchased the weapon.

“This was a mother who is learning that her kid is getting a gun and simply thinking, ‘What do I do?’ ” Mr. Ayres said.

The department asked a few questions about the firearm, but ultimately told her Mr. Crusius was legally allowed to own the gun.

Now the family is wondering what they missed, and where he picked up the ideas outlined in the manifesto authorities believe he posted.

When told about what Mr. Crusius has said to authorities, Mr. Ayres said: “This isn’t the Patrick they knew, and it’s not the view of the world that they have.”

Mr. Crusius was last seen by his twin sister when the two hung out at their grandparents’ house on Aug. 1, two days before the shooting. She didn’t notice anything out the ordinary with her brother, Mr. Ayres said. Mr. Crusius also visited the home the next night before making the approximately 10-hour drive to El Paso, but no other family members were there.

The celebratory posts on 8chan after the shooting reveal what experts say has become a motivation for many of the young men who launch attacks in public places: the desire for notoriety in the public and glory in certain corners of the internet, regardless of whether they survive or not.

“8chan not only has the manifestos, but users also have encouragement from the community that celebrates what they did and reminds all those users that if they do the same thing, they will never be forgotten. They will be lionized,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which monitors activity on social-media sites including 8chan.

Stephen G. White, a psychologist who has studied multiple mass shooters, said shooters were “ seeking to become the next alluring antihero….One of our concerns is that these guys are thinking about the body count. ‘How can I score more points than the last guy?’ It’s a very terrible trend.”

The two students who launched an attack at Columbine High School in 1999 have remained subjects of fascination for two decades. Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014, has become a hero to an online community of men who call themselves “Incels”—short for “involuntarily celibate”—who espouse misogynistic ideas and violence toward women. He was cited as an inspiration by a man who allegedly plowed his van into a crowd in Toronto last year, killing 10 people.

Jillian Peterson, a professor of criminal justice at Hamline University who studies the life histories of mass shooters, said the past 20 years of mass shootings and heavy media coverage have created a “cultural script” for people who are struggling emotionally to draw attention to themselves.

To be noticed today, she said, the shootings have to be “bigger and bolder” than in the past. “They are these violent performances, meant to be seen and watched,” she said.

—Zusha Elinson, Sadie Gurman, Jennifer Calfas, Tawnell D. Hobbs, Jim Carlton, Talal Ansari and Elisa Cho contributed to this article.

Write to Erin Ailworth at [email protected], Georgia Wells at [email protected] and Ian Lovett at [email protected]