Page 20 - Florida Sentinel 8-6-19

National
Two Chicago Mothers Working To End Gun Violence Were Shot Dead
Walmart Massacre In Texas Investigated By Authorities As Domestic Terrorism
Chantel Grant and Andrea Stoudemire
major outbreak of U. S. gun violence in a public place - a food festival in California where a teenager killed three people with an assault rifle and injured a dozen others before taking his own life in a hail of police gunfire.
The Texas killings were followed just 13 hours later by another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, where a gun- man in body armor and a mask killed nine people in less than a minute and wounded 27 others in the city’s downtown historic dis- trict before he was shot dead by police.
The shootings reverber- ated across the United States’ political arena on
Sunday as Democratic presi- dential candidates called for stricter gun laws and ac- cused President Donald Trump of stoking racial ten- sions.
Trump told reporters he would make a statement on Monday morning about the shootings.
“Hate has no place in our country, and we’re going to take care of it,” Trump said. “This is also a mental illness problem, if you look at both of these cases. These are re- ally people that are very, very seriously mentally ill.”
He had previously said on Twitter that the El Paso massacre was “an act of cow- ardice.”
Two Chicago mothers who fought against gun violence on the city's South Side were found shot dead.
Chantel Grant, 25 and Andrea Stoudemire 35, both from the Englewood neighborhood, were part of a group called Mothers Against Senseless Killings. The five- year-old grassroots organiza- tion aimed at counseling the youth in the neighborhood hoped to put a stop to the constant shootings.
According to reports, mothers from the area would "occupy" the corners handing out food and talking to the community's young people.
Police spokesman An- thony Guglielmi said the intended target for Friday night's shooting was a 58- year-old gang member who had just been released from prison. In the spray of bullets from the drive-by, rival street gang members shot the man in his arm. Guglielmi said he isn't cooperating with po- lice.
"We have no information to suggest they were the in-
tended targets," he said.
The founder of Mothers Against Senseless Killings Tamar Manasseh won't accept Grant and Stoudemire, who had seven children between them, were simply in the wrong place at the wrong
time.
"They killed mothers on a
corner where mothers sit every day," Manasseh said. "You don't have mothers killed in a place that is sacred to mothers and not take that as a message."
While speaking to CBS News, Manasseh said the women were on the corner handing out food and watch- ing children play in a vacant lot. At the end of the day, the two mothers left to get food for themselves when bullets came flying out of a blue SUV.
"They can't even walk to the store without getting killed," said Manasseh. "They were killed for parent- ing."
Police have not made any arrests.
El Paso Shooter Identified Online As Trump Supporter Who Didn’t Like ‘Race Mixing’
EL PASO, Texas (Reuters) - U. S. authorities investigat- ing what drove a young man from the Dallas area to kill 20 people at a Walmart store hundreds of miles away in the border city of El Paso said on Sunday they are treating it as a case of do- mestic terrorism.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Saturday’s ram- page appeared to be a hate crime, and police cited a manifesto they attributed to the suspect as evidence that the bloodshed was racially motivated.
A state prosecutor said they will seek the death penalty for the suspect, Patrick Crusius, 21, of Allen, Texas.
The U. S. attorney for the western district of Texas, John Bash, said federal au- thorities were treating the massacre as a case of domes- tic terrorism.
“And we’re going to do what we do to terrorists in this country, which is to de- liver swift and certain jus- tice,” Bash told reporters at a news conference on Sun- day.
He said the attack ap- peared “to be designed to in- timidate a civilian population, to say the least.”
The shooting happened just six days after the last
People pay their respects a day after a mass shooting at a Wal- mart store in El Paso, Texas, U.S. August 4, 2019.
The suspect in a deadly mass shooting at a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, on Sat- urday was widely identified on the internet as a young white man whose social media activ- ity showed support and sym- pathy for the president’s apparent white nationalist agenda. The name and photos of a man purported to be Patrick Crusius quickly cir- culated across Twitter in the hours after the shooting that first began outside a Walmart store at Cielo Vista Mall was first reported. If those reports were accurate, Crusius, al- legedly a Texas native, just turned 21 last week.
Washington Examiner re- porter Anna Giaritelli
PATRICK CRUSIUS
tweeted a photo of the suspect she said law enforcement iden- tified as being Patrick Cru- sius.
While officials did not im-
mediately announce the iden- tity of the shooter, the Wash- ington Examiner reported that “A law enforcement source in El Paso told the Washington Examiner that 21-year-old suspect Patrick Crusius from Dallas, Texas, has been taken into custody.”
A manifesto purportedly written by Crusius, perhaps even in the hours before the shooting attack that according to one report killed at least 15 people, was left behind. Pages of the manifesto included anti- immigrant rhetoric with the author going into depth on why he is “against race mix- ing,” supports the idea to “send them back” and offering a prediction of “genocide.”
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