Walmart shooter Patrick Crusuis will appear in El Paso court on Thursday

EL PASO, Texas (KFOX14/CBS4) — Patrick Crusius, federally convicted of killing Walmart, appeared in court Thursday morning.

Crusius appeared in person for the preliminary hearing in Judge Sam Medrano’s courtroom at the El Paso County Courthouse.

Early in the state’s case against the Walmart gunman, the defense accused the state of misconduct and presented evidence of it.

Six witnesses were sworn in at the preliminary hearing.

The entire three hours we spent in court were spent questioning Loretta Hewitt, the state’s former chief prosecutor.

She said that while working on the case, she found a DVD that she could not open.

She initially thought the video contained images, but when she saw the phone number, she realized that the number belonged to one of the defense attorneys, and the DVD recorded 4 phone calls between the defense and their client.

Once she discovered what it contained, she tried to go directly to District Attorney Bill Hicks to find out what steps to take to alert the defense that they had these calls.

When she couldn’t find Hicks, she decided to contact the defense and the judge overseeing the case directly to coordinate the release of the original disk to the defense.

Hewitt said that when she was finally able to contact Hicks and alert him to the steps she had taken, he became upset.

Hewitt then began looking into who was wiretapping the DA’s office and discovered that a paralegal named Claudia Hernandez had been wiretapping 6 to 7 times.

The defense argues this is evidence of a violation of the shooter’s 6th Amendment rights.

The defense said they obtained an audit of telephone conversations between them and their client, that the state had 15 telephone conversations and that Hernandez accessed them 17 times.

Hewitt went to the area of ​​Allen, Texas, where the criminal had long lived, and interviewed people who knew Crusius.

The defense has been arguing for some time that interviews made at the time were important to their case because they were indicative of the criminal’s mental state.

Hewitt kept extensive notes, and as of 2022, her personal policy was to share her notes without sharing strategy with the defense. She was going to do something, but claims that when she left the DA’s office, she left several notebooks containing all these notes. notes.

State officials said they do not know where the laptops are located.

Hewitt shared some of the statements she could remember that were shared by the shooter’s neighbors.

“They said he had problems and that he was being bullied. That there was no way he could have committed this crime alone and that he was indoctrinated. That his parents tried to help him with his mental problems. That he had outbursts of rage. in the classroom, and that he was institutionalized, that he had problems with his head, that his parents probably shouldn’t have kept him alive when he was sickly as a child,” Hewitt said.

The court is adjourned until Friday.

Crusius was convicted last year of federal charges in the deaths of 23 people in the Aug. 3 shooting at a Walmart in Cielo Vista.

Crusius was sentenced to 90 life sentences in 2023 in federal court after pleading guilty.

Crusius did appear in public during his federal sentencing, but cameras were not allowed in federal court.

Crusius is accused of killing 23 people and wounding several others on Aug. 3, 2019, at a Walmart near Cielo Vista in east El Paso.

Crusius’ state charges include capital murder and he could face the death penalty if convicted.

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