‘This touched everyone’: Walmart store reopens months after mass shooting

Three months after one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern US history, the Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, where 22 were killed in an August rampage reopened on Thursday amid tears and smiles from customers and staff as the border city continues to reel from the racially-driven tragedy.

The 9am opening began with the raising of the American flag – which had been flown at half-staff since the attack – and the unfurling of an “El Paso Strong” banner, a slogan which is now found on bumper stickers, shirts and buildings throughout the city.

Inside the store, hundreds of employees lined up to greet each new customer as they arrived, while cashiers, stockers and managers hugged, cried and laughed as intermittent cheers of “Welcome to Walmart” rang out through the store.

“It will take time to heal,” said El Paso resident Randy Villegas, just minutes before the store opened. “The situation was bad, but it made us strong. We’re here to show our pride and move on from that terrible day.”

On 3 August, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old from Allen, Texas, entered the Walmart in eastern El Paso, not far from the US-Mexico border, and opened fire on shoppers with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing 22 and injuring dozens of others.

Upon his arrest, Crusius confirmed he was the shooter and stated his target were “Mexicans”, according to a police affidavit. According to a racist, white nationalist rant posted online shortly before the attack and thought to have been written by the suspect, the shooting was a response to what it called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas”.

“I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion,” the author wrote on the far-right message board 8chan.

Crusius pleaded not guilty last month to murder charges. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

For residents of El Paso, a border city that is more than three-quarters Hispanic, the alleged racist motivations of the attack have had a profound and lingering impact.

“Everyone in El Paso knew someone that was here, this touched everyone,” said Villegas, whose wife and best friend both work at the Walmart on Gateway Boulevard but were off during the day of the attack.

It is thought that almost 3,000 witnesses were present during the sustained attack.

“He was after people like us,” said Javier Luis, a father of three from Ciudad Juarez, El Paso’s sister city in Mexico, directly across the Rio Grande which forms the border dividing the two metropolises.

Luis said he crosses into the US with his wife Maria once a month to shop at this particular Walmart branch, as do many Mexicans living near this part of the border.

“We were scared to come back, but racism won’t change how we live,” he said determinedly.

In the US, mass shootings have become more frequent and more deadly.

The attack in El Paso was just one of 22 fatal mass shootings in the US this year alone, and of the 10 deadliest massacres in the modern US, four have occurred in Texas.

According to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a not-for-profit research group tracking mass shootings and gun violence, the number of mass shootings (defined by GVA as an attack where at least four people were shot) in the US has thus far outpaced the number of days in 2019. Just as the store opened, news came through of multiple people shot at a high school in Santa Clarita, in southern California.

El Paso resident Miguel Arturo, who was at the Walmart reopening to get his regular consignment of groceries, specifically some avocados, he said, remarked that the city and the country could learn from such tragedies.

“Who needs assault rifles?” he asked, echoing the point recently and forcefully made by local political luminary Beto O’Rourke following the El Paso shooting.

O’Rourke dropped out of the 2020 presidential race just days ago, but he made his mark with gun control advocates.

“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke said at the Democratic primary debate in September. “We’re not going to allow them to be used against fellow Americans any more.”

For Villegas and others, the hope is that the re-opening of the store can be a small step towards healing and a return to normal life.

“This attack does not represent our city,” said Villegas, as more and more customers poured into the store, while welcoming cheers continued to ring out from the staff. “We won’t forget, but we will move on.”