Across the Courtroom

A woman stood in an El Paso courtroom and asked permission to cross the floor.

Her name was Yolanda Tinajero. She was seventy-one years old. On the other side of that courtroom stood a young man in an orange-and-white jail uniform, his wrists shackled, a ballistic vest strapped around his body. His name was Patrick Crusius.

Six years earlier, on an August morning in 2019, Crusius had walked into a Walmart in El Paso carrying a rifle. Before it was over, twenty-three people were dead and twenty-two others wounded. One of the dead was Yolanda’s brother, Arturo Benavides, a sixty-year-old husband, uncle and beloved member of a large extended family.

Now he was gone. And six years later, his sister was sitting only a few yards from the man who had killed him.

There are distances measured in feet. There are distances measured in miles. And then there are distances no ruler can measure at all. The distance between those two people in that El…