The trial of the man accused of carrying out the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history got underway Tuesday with prosecutors playing a recording of a synagogue victim’s 911 call reporting that her husband had been shot.
“We’re being attacked!” Bernice Simon told a dispatcher after a gunman carrying multiple firearms, including an AR-15 rifle and three handguns, entered Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018 and opened fire, ultimately killing 11 people and injuring several others. Simon and her husband would be among the dead.
Robert Bowers, a 50-year-old truck driver from the Pittsburgh suburb of Baldwin, could face the death penalty if convicted of some of the 63 counts with which he is charged, including 11 counts each of obstruction of free exercise of religion resulting in death and hate crimes resulting in death.
The attack happened as members of several local congregations gathered to mark the Sabbath. A grim and somber hush enveloped the wood-paneled federal courtroom in downtown Pittsburgh, with members of each congregation – Dor Hadash, New Light and Tree of Life – in attendance at Tuesday’s proceedings.
Survivors emotional as opening statements begin
Prosecutors have said Bowers made incriminating statements to investigators and left an online trail of antisemitic statements indicating the attack was motivated by religious hatred. In a filing earlier this year, prosecutors said Bowers “harbored deep, murderous animosity towards all Jewish people.”
“The depths of the defendant’s malice and hate can only be proven in the broken bodies” of the victims and “his hateful words,” federal prosecutor Soo C. Song, assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said in her opening statements.
Survivors dabbed tears as Song spoke, while Bowers showed no reaction.
‘There is no making sense of this senseless act’
Bowers’ offer to plead guilty in return for a life sentence was declined by prosecutors, and his lawyers are largely focused on avoiding the death penalty rather than absolving him of guilt. In the long run-up to the trial, they focused on quizzing potential jurors about how they would decide whether to impose the death penalty in the case of a man charged with hate-motivated killings in a house of worship, asking whether they would consider factors such as mental illness or a difficult childhood.
Recently, they have said Bowers has schizophrenia and brain impairments.
On Tuesday, defense attorney Judy Clarke acknowledged that Bowers planned the massacre, made hateful anti-Jewish statements and that he had gone to the synagogue that day and “shot every person he saw.” But she questioned whether Bowers had acted out of hatred or an irrational belief that he needed to kill Jews to save others from a genocide he claimed they were enabling by helping immigrants come to the U.S.
“He had what to us is this unthinkable, nonsensical, irrational thought that by killing Jews he would attain his goal,” Clarke said, adding: “There is no making sense of this senseless act. Mr. Bowers caused extraordinary harm to many, many people.”
Shannon Basa-Sabol, the dispatcher who took Simon’s call, testified that she advised the woman to find her husband’s wound and stanch the bleeding. Additional gunfire and screaming followed.
“Bernice, are you still with me?” Basa-Sabol asked in the recording, but no answer came.
Contributing: The Associated Press.
