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EL PASO (AP) – Speaking to the gunman who killed her brother and 22 other people, Yolanda Tinajero did not raise her voice or condemn him for his racist attack at a Walmart in 2019. Instead she told him Tuesday that she forgave him, and wished she could give him a hug.

The judge, in a surprising turn in an El Paso courtroom, allowed her to do just that.

Their brief embrace — while Patrick Crusius was still shackled — was among many emotionally charged moments during two days of impact statements given by victims’ family members and survivors.

Some described their pain and devastation while others assured him the community had met his hatred with love and unity. Later, another person also hugged the man who pleaded guilty in one of the deadliest mass shootings in the U.S.

Crusius, a white community college dropout, had posted online a screed about a Hispanic invasion of Texas before opening fire with an AK-style rifle at the store near the U.S.-Mexico border on Aug. 3, 2019. Crusius didn’t address the families and survivors at his plea hearing Monday. He will serve multiple life sentences after pleading guilty to capital murder and 22 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

“We would have opened our doors to you to share a meal, breakfast lunch or dinner, Mexican-style, so then your ugly thoughts of us that have been instilled in you would have turned around,” Tinajero told him.
‘Hug you very tight’

Tinajero said her brother, 60-year-old Arturo Benavides, was a “kind, sweet-hearted person,” whose wife of over 30 years is broken hearted over her loss.

“Now she lives alone in their home full of memories that she can’t forget,” she said.

“I feel in my heart, to hug you very tight so you could feel my forgiveness, especially my loss, but I know it’s not allowed,” Tinajero said. “I want you to see and feel all of us who have been impacted by your actions.”

Later, the judge asked her: “Ma’am, would it truly bring you peace and comfort if you could hug him?”

’Yes,” she replied.

Her daughter, Melissa Tinajero, told reporters: “I don’t know how she was able to do it. I could not do that. But she showed him something he could not show his victims.”
‘A survivor, not a victim’

Stephanie Melendez told Crusius that she did not want to address him but rather read a letter to her father, 63-year-old David Johnson, who was killed when he shielded his wife and 9-year-old granddaughter from the gunfire.

Melendez thanked her father for making her study, giving her a curfew and telling her when she was 16 that she needed to get a job.

“You made me into the strong woman I am today,” she said.

Her daughter, Kaitlyn Melendez, now 14, told Crusius: “I am a survivor, not a victim.”

“I’m going to walk out these doors and move forward with my life and not let you haunt me anymore.”
‘A disgrace to humanity’

Dean Reckard, whose 63-year-old mother Margie Reckard was among those killed, expressed anger and forgiveness as he addressed Crusius.

“You’re a disgrace to humanity and to your family,” Reckard said, adding that he hopes Crusius wakes up each morning wishing he were dead.

But Reckard also said he forgave the gunman who will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

“In order to be forgiving, you have to forgive others,” he said. “That’s the only reason I forgive you. May God have mercy on your soul.”

Thousands of people attended Margie Reckard’s funeral after her partner of 22 years, Antonio Basco, invited the public to the service, saying he felt alone after her death.
‘Left me sad, bitter’

Liliana Munoz of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, said in court Monday that she was shopping for snacks when Crusius opened fire, forever changing her life physically, economically and emotionally.

In her statement, she said she used to be a “happy, dancing person,” but now is afraid every morning when she awakes. Since she was shot, she has had to use a cane to walk and wears a leg brace to keep her left foot from dragging.

“It left me sad, bitter,” said the 41-year-old mother.

She also granted Crusius forgiveness.
‘You brought us together’

Javier Rodriguez was 15 and starting his sophomore year in high school when he was shot and killed at a bank in Walmart.

On Tuesday his father Francisco Rodriguez shouted at Crusius: “Look at me, I’m talking to you.”

He told Crusius that he and his family have to go to the cemetery to commemorate his son’s birthday.

“I wish I could just get five minutes with you — me and you — and get all of this, get it over with,” he said.

But Rodriguez also referred to comments made about Crusius’ impact on El Paso during his sentencing.

“Like the judge said yesterday, you came down to El Paso with the intention of tearing us apart, but all you did, you brought us together,” he said.

HOUSTON (AP) — A Texas man is facing execution Wednesday for the strangling and stabbing death of a young North Texas mother more than 20 years ago.

Moises Sandoval Mendoza was condemned for the March 2004 killing of 20-year-old Rachelle O’Neil Tolleson. Prosecutors say Mendoza took Tolleson from her home in Farmersville, leaving her 6-month-old daughter alone. The infant was found cold and wet but safe the next day by Tolleson’s mother. Tolleson’s body was found six days later near a creek.

Mendoza, 41, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.

Evidence in Mendoza’s case showed he also burned Tolleson’s body to hide his fingerprints. Dental records were used to identify her, according to investigators.

Mendoza’s lawyers have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the scheduled execution after lower courts previously rejected his petitions for a stay. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday denied Mendoza’s request to commute his death sentence to a lesser penalty.

In their petition before the Supreme Court, Mendoza’s attorneys said he was prevented by lower courts from arguing that he had been denied effective assistance of counsel earlier in the appeals process.

Mendoza’s lawyers allege that a previous appeals attorney, as well as his trial lawyer, had failed to challenge critical testimony by a detention officer, Robert Hinton. That testimony was used by prosecutors to persuade jurors that Mendoza would be a future danger to society — a legal finding needed to secure a death sentence in Texas.

Mendoza’s lawyers allege the officer, who worked in the county jail where the inmate was being held after his arrest, gave false testimony that Mendoza had started a fight with another inmate. Mendoza’s lawyers say the other inmate now claims in an affidavit that he believed detention officers wanted him to start the fight, and he was later rewarded for it.

“There is no doubt the jury was listening. During its deliberations, the jury specifically asked about Mendoza’s ‘criminal acts while in jail,’ including the ‘assault on other inmate,’” Mendoza’s lawyers said in their petition to the Supreme Court. “As evidenced by the jury’s notes, there is a reasonable probability that trial counsel’s error in failing to investigate Hinton’s testimony affected the result.”

But the Texas Attorney General’s Office told the Supreme Court that Mendoza’s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel has already been found by a lower federal court to be “meritless and insubstantial.”

Even if the detention officer’s testimony were eliminated, the jury heard substantial evidence regarding Mendoza’s future dangerousness and his long history of violence, especially against women, including physically attacking his mother and sister and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, according to the attorney general’s office.

“Finally, given the extreme delay in this two-decade-old case, the public interest weighs heavily against a stay. The State and crime victims have a ’powerful and legitimate interest in punishing the guilty,’” the attorney general’s office said in its petition.

Authorities said that in the days before the killing, Mendoza had attended a party at Tolleson’s home in Farmersville, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) northeast of Dallas. On the day her body was found, Mendoza told a friend about the killing. The friend called police and Mendoza was arrested.

Mendoza confessed to police but couldn’t give detectives a reason for his actions, authorities said. He told investigators he repeatedly choked Tolleson, sexually assaulted her and dragged her body to a field, where he choked her again and then stabbed her in the throat. He later moved her body to a more remote location and burned it.

If the execution is carried out, Mendoza would be the third inmate put to death this year in Texas, historically the nation’s busiest capital punishment state, and the 13th in the U.S.

On Thursday, Alabama planned to execute James Osgood for the 2010 rape and murder of a woman.

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Follow Juan A. Lozano: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70

McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Hubert Montoya burst out laughing when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security emailed to say he should leave the country immediately or risk consequences of being deported. He is a U.S. citizen.

“I just thought it was absurd,” the Austin, Texas, immigration attorney said.

It was an apparent glitch in the Trump administration’s dismantling of another Biden-era policy that allowed people to live and work in the country temporarily. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is quietly revoking two-year permits of people who used an online appointment app at U.S. border crossings with Mexico called CBP One, which brought in more than 900,000 people starting in January 2023.

The revocation of CBP One permits has lacked the fanfare and formality of canceling Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands whose homelands were previously deemed unsafe for return and humanitarian parole for others from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who came with financial sponsors. Those moves came with official notices in the Federal Register and press releases. Judges halted them from taking effect after advocacy groups sued.

CBP One cancellation notices began landing in inboxes in late March without warning, some telling recipients to leave immediately and others giving them seven days. Targets included U.S. citizens.

Timothy J. Brenner, a Connecticut-born lawyer in Houston, was told April 11 to leave the U.S. “I became concerned that the administration has a list of immigration attorneys or a database that they’re trying to target to harass,” he said.

CBP confirmed in a statement that it issued notices terminating temporary legal status under CBP One. It did not say how many, just that they weren’t sent to all beneficiaries, which totaled 936,000 at the end of December.

CBP said notices may have been sent to unintended recipients, including attorneys, if beneficiaries provided contact information for U.S. citizens. It is addressing those situations case-by-case.

Online chat groups reflect fear and confusion, which, according to critics, is the administration’s intended effect. Brenner said three clients who received the notices chose to return to El Salvador after being told to leave.

“The fact that we don’t know how many people got this notice is part of the problem. We’re getting reports from attorneys and folks who don’t know what to make of the notice,” said Hillary Li, counsel for the Justice Action Center, an advocacy group.

President Donald Trump suspended CBP One for new arrivals his first day in office but those already in the U.S. believed they could stay at least until their two-year permits expired. The cancellation notices that some received ended that sense of temporary stability. “It is time for you to leave the United States,” the letters began.

“It’s really confusing,” said Robyn Barnard, senior director for refugee advocacy at Human Rights First. “Imagine how people who entered through that process feel when they’re hearing through their different community chats, rumors or screenshots that some friends have received notice and others didn’t.”

Attorneys say some CBP One beneficiaries may still be within a one-year window to file an asylum claim or seek other relief.

Notices have been sent to others whose removal orders are on hold under other forms of temporary protection. A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily halted deportations for more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came since late 2022 after applying online with a financial sponsor and flying to a U.S. airport at their own expense.

Maria, a 48-year-old Nicaraguan woman who cheered Trump’s election and arrived via that path, said the notice telling her to leave landed like “a bomb. It paralyzed me.”

Maria, who asked to be named only by her middle name for fear of being detained and deported, said in a telephone interview from Florida that she would continue cleaning houses to support herself and file for asylum.

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Salomon reported from Miami. Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana in Washington and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed.

UVALDE (ABC) — An attorney representing the families of the Robb Elementary School mass shooting victims confirmed to ABC News on Tuesday night that a settlement was reached and approved by a unanimous vote at a city council meeting in Uvalde, Texas.

Josh Koskoff, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit against the city, did not specify the exact terms of the settlement.

The lawsuit responds to the circumstances surrounding the school shooting that took place on May 24, 2022, claiming the lives of two teachers and 19 students.

In addition to a monetary settlement that would be paid out by the city’s insurance, the families were asking for Uvalde Police to adopt new fitness standards for the force and boost officer training, attorneys announced at a press conference in May 2024.

At the time of filing the suit, Koskoff told ABC News that the plaintiffs also were asking the city to maintain the cemetery where many of the victims are buried and to provide an updated accounting of the donations and spending related to May 24.

The plaintiffs were also asking to designate May 24 as an official day of remembrance in Uvalde and to create a committee for a permanent memorial in town.

The attorney confirmed all 21 victims’ families were represented in the lawsuit, but didn’t disclose any others who are listed as plaintiffs.

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