Authorities name the 11 killed in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting

By Avi Selk , Mark Berman and Joel Achenbach

Authorities have named the 11 people killed Saturday when a man armed with three pistols and a semiautomatic assault-style rifle attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh — the deadliest attack on Jews in the history of the United States.

The dead include a 97-year-old woman, a husband and wife, and two brothers — all of whom were at services inside the Tree of Life synagogue when Robert Bowers allegedly burst in through an open door, screaming anti-Semitic slurs and shooting. The 46-year-old Pittsburgh resident is also accused of wounding six other people, including three police officers shot during a firefight, and faces a raft of assault, homicide and hate crime charges.

“They’re committing genocide to my people,” the suspect told a SWAT officer after being shot and captured, according to a federal criminal complaint released Sunday. “I just want to kill Jews.”

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto called the attack the “darkest day of Pittsburgh’s history” after the victims’ names were read out Sunday morning. The mayor also disputed President Trump’s suggestion that the synagogue should have had armed guards.

“We will not try to rationalize irrational behavior,” Peduto told reporters. “We will work to eradicate it. We will work to eradicated it from our city, and our nation, and our world. Hatred will not have a place anywhere.”

The mass shooting targeted a congregation that is an anchor of Pittsburgh’s large and close-knit Jewish community, a massacre that authorities immediately labeled a hate crime as they investigated the suspect’s history of anti-Semitic online screeds.

The FBI said Bowers was not previously known to law enforcement. He was charged with 29 counts of federal crimes of violence and firearms offenses, federal prosecutors said late Saturday.

A man with Bowers’s name had posted anti-Semitic statements on social media before the shooting, expressing anger that a nonprofit Jewish organization in the neighborhood has helped refugees settle in the United States. In what appeared to be his final social media post hours before the attack, the man wrote: “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Bowers allegedly burst into the synagogue’s regular Saturday 9:45 a.m. service with an AR-15-style rifle and three handguns, authorities said. Witnesses told police he shouted anti-Semitic statements and began firing. The synagogue, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, did not have armed security guards.

Police received calls about an active shooter at 9:54 a.m. and dispatched officers a minute later. Police said Bowers left the building and encountered the responding officers, shooting one before retreating into the synagogue to hide.

Officers pursued Bowers to the synagogue’s third floor, according to a criminal complaint. He allegedly opened fire, shooting two officers multiple times and critically wounding one of them before he was wounded in the gun battle and captured.

According to the complaint, while Bowers was in custody with multiple gunshot wounds, he told a SWAT operator “that he wanted all Jews to die and also that they (Jews) were committing genocide to his people.”

Bodies lay throughout the synagogue — three women and eight men killed, and two other worshipers wounded.

Four police officers were wounded during the response — three shot and one hit by shrapnel — and were in stable condition late Saturday. It was unclear late Saturday whether Bowers was speaking with authorities or had an attorney.

Federal prosecutors filed 29 counts against Bowers, charging him with federal civil rights crimes. Bowers was charged with obstructing exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death, using a firearm to commit murder during a crime of violence, obstructing exercise of religious beliefs resulting in an injury to a public safety officer, and using a firearm during a crime of violence.

The charges were announced in a statement released by Scott W. Brady, U.S. attorney for the western district of Pennsylvania, and Robert Jones, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office. Court documents were not immediately available and were expected to be released Sunday morning.

The Pittsburgh massacre is yet another example of the homicidal fury and bigotry on the fringes of American society. It weaves together elements of many other active-shooter incidents that have horrified Americans in recent years, and highlighted the unusual frequency of mass casualty events in this country in comparison with almost every other nation in the world.

Once again the suspect was a man armed with a semiautomatic assault-style weapon — as was, for example, the gunman who killed 49 people in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in 2016. Once again the crime scene was a house of worship, a classic “soft target,” as was the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., where a disturbed gunman hoping to kill his mother-in-law slaughtered 26 people during a Sunday service last November.

And once again the victims were members of an ethnic or religious minority with a long history of persecution — as were the nine African American worshipers killed three years ago when a white supremacist invaded a Bible study session at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

“This was the single most lethal and violent attack on the Jewish community in the history of the country,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “We’ve never had an attack of such depravity where so many people were killed.… When you go into a synagogue, saying ‘I want to kill all the Jews,’ that’s a hate crime.”

Political, religious and civic leaders condemned Saturday’s massacre and vowed to support the Jewish community.

“We simply cannot accept this violence as a normal part of American life,” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D), said during an afternoon news conference, his voice shaking. “These senseless acts of violence are not who we are as Pennsylvanians, they’re not who we are as Americans.”

President Trump denounced the massacre and said something needs to be done about such crimes, suggesting a more frequent and speedier use of the death penalty, saying it should be “brought into vogue.”

“It’s a terrible, terrible thing, what’s going on with hate in our country and frankly all over the world,” Trump said before boarding Air Force One on Saturday afternoon for a flight to Indianapolis. The president made a full-throated denunciation of ­anti-Semitism at a rally in Murphysboro, Ill., later in the day: “This evil anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us. It’s an assault on humanity. It will require all of us working together to extract the hateful poison of anti-Semitism from our world.”

He said the massacre could have been prevented if the synagogue had armed security guards. Trump has frequently suggested that more armed people could deter mass shootings, making such comments after shooting rampages in Parkland, Fla., and Orlando in recent years. Armed law enforcement officers were, in fact, present at both of those mass shootings.

Trump ordered flags flown at half-mast at public grounds until sunset Wednesday in “solemn respect” for the victims, the White House said in a statement.

The Anti-Defamation League, founded more than a century ago, has documented numerous murderous attacks on Jews in the United States, such as the assault by a white supremacist on the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 2009 that killed a security guard. The previous deadliest anti-Semitic attack, the ADL said, was actually a case of mistaken religious identity that claimed four lives. It happened in 1985, when a racist attacked Charles Goldmark and his family in Seattle, thinking they were Jewish.

The ADL said Saturday that anti-Semitic incidents rose 57 percent in 2017, with 1,986 documented events, a spike the league attributed to an increase of such incidents in high schools and on college campuses.