A truck driver who expressed hatred of Jews has been convicted of barging into a Pittsburgh synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath and fatally shooting 11 congregants in an act of antisemitic terror for which he could be sentenced to die.
The guilty verdict on Friday against Robert Bowers was a foregone conclusion. Bowers’s lawyers conceded at the trial’s outset that he attacked and killed worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue on 27 October 2018, in the deadliest attack on Jews in the US in American history.
“I am grateful to God for getting us to this day,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, who survived the attack, said in a statement reported by the Pittsburgh Gazette. “And I am thankful for the law enforcement who ran into danger to rescue me, and the US attorney who stood up in court to defend my right to pray.
“In the face of the horror [that] our community has experienced, I can think of no better response than practicing my Jewish faith and leading worship,” Rabbi Myers added.
Jurors must now decide whether the 50-year-old should be sent to death row or sentenced to life in prison without parole as the federal trial shifts to a penalty phase expected to last several weeks. Jurors will be asked to decide first if Bowers is eligible for the death penalty, and then to decide if it is warranted.
That decision may turn on whether Bowers was acting, as the government contends, with a conscious intent to obstruct the exercise of religious worship or, as his defense attorneys argued at trial, Bowers was acting out of an “irrational” belief that HIAS, a Jewish resettlement agency, was leading to a “genocide” of white people.
“In his mind he needed to kill Jews who supported HIAS because they were bringing in immigrants who were committing genocide against children,” the federal public defender Elisa Long said in closing arguments. “None of this makes any sense, none of this is true, but it is what Mr Bowers believed to be real and true.”
Bowers’s “disturbing and ugly” social media postings, Long added, “give us some insight into Mr. Bowers sense of reality no matter how distorted it may be”.
Bowers was tried on 63 criminal counts, including hate crimes resulting in death and obstruction of the free exercise of religion resulting in death. His attorneys had offered a guilty plea in return for a life sentence, but prosecutors refused, opting instead to take the case to trial and pursue the death penalty. Most of the victims’ families expressed support for the decision.
Bowers turned a sacred house of worship into a “hunting ground”, targeting his victims because of their religion, a prosecutor told jurors on Thursday. Reading the names of each of the 11 victims he killed, the prosecutor Mary Hahn asked the jury to “hold this defendant accountable … and hold him accountable for those who cannot testify”.
Bowers, who was armed with an AR-15 rifle and other weapons, also shot and wounded seven, including five responding police officers.
Prosecutors presented evidence of his deep-seated animosity toward Jews and immigrants. Over 11 days of testimony, jurors learned that Bowers had extensively posted, shared or liked antisemitic and white supremacist content on Gab, a social media platform popular with the far right, and praised Hitler and the Holocaust. Bowers told police that “all these Jews need to die,” Hahn said.
Survivors testified about the terror they felt that day, including a woman who recounted how she was shot in the arm and then realized her 97-year-old-mother had been shot and killed right next to her. Andrea Wedner, the trial’s last witness, told jurors she touched her mother’s lifeless body and cried out, “Mommy”, before Swat officers led her to safety.
Bower’s attorneys had never disputed that their client was the shooter. “He shot every person he saw,” lead defense attorney Judy Clarke said in opening statements.
In the closing phase of the trial, Bowers’s attorney Elisa Long echoed those comments, and acknowledged “the devastation, the loss and the unbearable grief” caused by Bowers for which there was “no excuse, no justification”.
With Bowers’s guilt established, survivors and family members of the deceased victims are expected to tell the jury about the devastating impact of his crimes. The penalty phase is scheduled to start next week.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
English (US)