One Year After Walmart Massacre, El Paso Mourns — At A Distance

Adria Gonzalez still remembers the blood, the screaming, the bodies.

On August 3, 2019, she was shopping with her mother at a Walmart Supercenter in El Paso, Texas, when a gunman opened fire with an AK-47, killing 23 people and leaving more than two dozen others wounded.

"It was terrible," Gonzalez told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of NPR's Weekend Edition. "But that's when I started to see people not knowing where to go, and I started yelling in Spanish and in English vamonos, vamonos, let's go ... and people were following me."

Gonzalez is credited with saving dozens of lives.

On Monday, she and El Paso are marking the anniversary of what authorities called the deliberate targeting of Latinos. Federal prosecutors have charged a suspect with hate crimes; he has pleaded not guilty. Authorities say he wrote a racist and xenophobic screed before driving hundreds of miles to target the city where 80% of residents are of Mexican descent.

"I always say El Paso is familia. It's family," Gonzalez said. "I knew a lot of people who passed away in this tragic morning. That's how connected we are in El Paso."