The 'Invasion' He Posted to 8chan
Minutes before killing 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019, the gunman uploaded a screed to the imageboard 8chan that described a “Hispanic invasion” and praised the Christchurch mosque attacker. Investigators and researchers later traced how the site's culture of racist posting fed a mass shooting.
On the morning of Aug. 3, 2019, a gunman opened fire inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, a border city where many shoppers were Hispanic. The attack killed 23 people and injured 22 others, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Patrick Crusius, then 21, was arrested at the scene.
A document uploaded before the shots
Roughly 20 minutes before the first 911 calls, a four-page document titled “The Inconvenient Truth” was posted to 8chan, an anonymous imageboard, according to a CNN account of the case. The document opened by aligning its author with the man who had killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, five months earlier: “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” it read. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic Invasion of Texas.”
The screed invoked the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that claims white populations are being deliberately displaced by non-white immigration — the same false narrative cited by the Christchurch attacker, according to The Washington Post. Crusius, the Justice Department said, later admitted he had targeted people because of their “actual and perceived national origin” and had chosen the border city to deter Hispanic immigration.
An imageboard already tied to killings
The El Paso attack was at least the third mass shooting in 2019 in which a suspect was believed to have used 8chan to post a manifesto before opening fire, following the Christchurch attack and a shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, CNN reported. Researchers who study online extremism have described a pattern in which attackers frame their violence for a receptive audience and cite one another's writings, a dynamic the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center called a “chain reaction” of transnational right-wing terror. Days after the El Paso shooting, the network provider Cloudflare cut off 8chan, saying the site had been unable to control the content it hosted.
Two guilty pleas, decades apart in law
In July 2023, Crusius pleaded guilty to 90 federal charges, including hate crimes, and was sentenced to 90 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, the Justice Department said. On April 21, 2025, he pleaded guilty to state capital murder charges and received an additional life sentence, according to The Texas Tribune. At the state hearing, District Judge Sam Medrano told him: “While you, your name and your hate, will be forgotten.” El Paso County District Attorney James Montoya said the case underscored “the hateful ideology that motivated him,” adding that “there are other public figures and elected officials that espouse and promote this ideology.”
The El Paso attack has become one of the most closely studied examples of an anonymous message board's culture feeding real-world violence — a sequence researchers and prosecutors continue to cite as they weigh how platforms should answer for the content they carry.