A judge in the United States has sentenced a man to 90 consecutive life terms in prison for a racist 2019 mass shooting that targeted Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and left 23 people dead.
US District Judge David Guaderrama handed down the sentence on Friday to Patrick Crusius, who pleaded guilty in February in exchange for avoiding a federal death sentence.
Crusius still faces Texas state charges that could result in the death penalty.
“You left children without their parents, you left spouses without their spouses, and we still need them,” Bertha Benavides, whose husband was killed in the massacre, told Crusius during emotional impact statements by victims delivered in court earlier this week.
Prosecutors said Crusius drove more than 1,126km (700 miles) overnight from suburban Dallas to the US-Mexico border city of El Paso, carrying out the massacre on August 3, 2019, with a Romanian derivative of the AK-47 and hollow-point ammunition.
The attack was motivated by Crusius’s belief that immigrants from Latin America were carrying out a “Hispanic invasion” of Texas in what he termed “ethnic replacement”, authorities said.
Original from www.aljazeera.com