Editor’s note: A year ago, shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso found themselves in the crosshairs of white supremacist Patrick Wood Crusius, a 21-year-old from Allen, a town outside of Dallas, during one of the country’s worst mass shootings and most heinous acts of racist domestic terrorism. In this evocative essay, a veteran journalist talks about what’s happened to her beloved El Paso and its stout residents since the shooting. This essay also appears on the websites of palabra by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and El Paso Matters.
Eduardo Castro, known as Eddie, couldn’t wait to get out of the car. He was impatient with the time it was taking to retrieve his walker from the trunk. On a hot summer day, he had crossed the border from Ciudad Juárez in Mexico so he could see the woman he calls his angel.
It was their first connection since the mass shooting—the deaths of 23 people and the wounding of dozens more—at the Walmart store on El Paso’s east side. Castro, 72, was full of emotion as he greeted Adria Gonzalez and her mother. Talk quickly turned to that day, August 3, 2019, and the deep wound that still stretches across the long border between Texas and Mexico. For the next two hours, the trio recounted what had happened; how life changed the moment they heard the snaps of rapid gunfire.
