Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Edited by: TJVNews.com

A jury on Tuesday was deliberating whether the man who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue should receive the death penalty or life in prison without parole, as was reported by the AP.

Robert Bowers, a 50-year-old truck driver from suburban Baldwin in Pennsylvania perpetrated the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history when he stormed the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill section of the western Pennsylvania city in October 2018 and opened fire on that fateful Saturday morning, killing members of three congregations who had gathered for Sabbath worship and study.

The AP report indicated that the same jury that convicted Bowers in June on 63 criminal counts began deliberating his sentence around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, and returned to the courtroom soon after to look at guns that were used in the attack.

In closing arguments Monday, prosecutors said the 50-year-old truck driver was clearly motivated by religious hatred, reminding jurors that Bowers had spread anti-Semitic content online before the attack and has since expressed pride in the killings, as was reported by the AP. They urged jurors to impose a death sentence.

Lawyers representing Bowers asked jurors to spare his life, asserting that he acted out of a delusional belief that Jewish people were helping to bring about a genocide of white people, according to the AP report. In order to save Bowers from death row, his attorneys said he has severe mental illness and endured a difficult childhood.

Bowers, who was armed with an AR-15 rifle and other weapons, also shot and wounded seven, including five responding police officers, the AP report stated. Among those congregants murdered that day in the fall of 2018 were Pittsburgh residents Joyce Fienberg, 75, Richard Gottfried, 65, Rose Mallinger, 97, Jerry Rabinowitz, 66, Cecil, 59 & David Rosenthal, 54, Bernice, 84 & Sylvan Simon, 86, Daniel Stein, 71, Melvin Wax, 88 and Irving Younger, 69.

Last week, the AP reported that a federal judge rejected a request by Bowers’ lawyers to exhume the body of the defendant’s father to prove paternity.

Bowers’ lawyers had wanted the body disinterred for a DNA test after prosecutors raised questions about paternity during Bowers’ trial for the 2018 massacre. Bowers faces a possible death sentence after being convicted in June of killing 11 people who had gathered for Sabbath worship and study.

Trying to persuade jurors to spare his life, the defense said Bowers has a family history of mental illness and has introduced evidence that his father, Randall Bowers, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, as was reported by the AP. The defense asserts that Robert Bowers also has schizophrenia and opened fire at the synagogue out of a delusional belief that Jews were helping to commit a genocide against white people.

Randall Bowers died by suicide in 1979 on the eve of his own rape trial, the AP report said. At trial last week, prosecutors sought to cast doubt on whether he was Robert Bowers’ biological father. The defense asked the judge to clear up the matter by ordering the exhumation of Randall Bowers’ body.

U.S. District Judge Robert Colville agreed with prosecutors that the defense waited too long to make its motion for exhumation, noting Bowers’ own mother questioned whether Randall Bowers was the biological father when a defense expert spoke to her in November 2022., the AP report noted. The defense should have anticipated that federal prosecutors would seek to rebut paternity, Colville said in the ruling. The judge also said he probably lacks legal authority to order a disinterment.

Mental health experts hired by the defense told jurors that they diagnosed Robert Bowers with schizophrenia, a serious brain disorder whose symptoms include delusions and and hallucinations, as was reported by the AP. A neurologist testifying for the prosecution disputed that Bowers has schizophrenia and said mental illness did not appear to play a role in the attack.

“This was a person who from the beginning had a childhood that was just laden with trauma, neglect and abuse from before he was born,” Katherine Porterfield testified for the defense during the sentencing phase of Robert Bowers’ trial, the AP reported.

Porterfield’s second day of testimony focused on Bowers’ teen and adult years. He showed some improvement around age 13 after an extended hospitalization in a juvenile mental health unit, but he returned to a highly unstable home and self-threatening behavior, according to the AP report. He threatened or attempted suicide multiple times in his teens, including by setting himself on fire, Porterfield said.

As an adult, Bowers had threatened to fatally shoot himself. The AP reported that he was terminated from the only long-term job he could maintain, as a truck driver for a local bakery and for stealing money. Family members recognized he was barely functioning as an adult and tried to help him find jobs and housing, but he had no effective intervention to address mental illness, Porterfield said, the report added.

In June of this year, the Jewish Voice had reported that prosecutors presented evidence of Bowers’ deep-seated animosity toward Jews and immigrants. The AP reported that over 11 days of testimony, jurors learned that Bowers had extensively posted, shared or liked anti-Semitic 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,” prosecutor Mary 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, according to the AP report.  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.

With Bowers’ guilt established, survivors and family members of the deceased victims were expected to tell the jury about the devastating impact of his crimes.

Bowers’ attorneys did not mount a defense at the guilt stage of the trial, signaling they will focus their efforts on trying to save his life. The AP reported that they introduced evidence that Bowers has schizophrenia, epilepsy and brain impairments. Defense lawyer Judy Clarke had also sought to raise questions about Bowers’ motive, suggesting to jurors that his rampage was not motivated by religious hatred but his delusional belief that Jews were committing genocide by helping refugees settle in the United States.

The three congregations that shared the synagogue building — Dor Hadash, New Light and Tree of Life — have spoken out against anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry since the attack, according to the AP report. The Tree of Life congregation also is working on a plan to overhaul the synagogue building — which still stands but has been closed since the shootings — by creating a complex that would house a sanctuary, museum, memorial and center for fighting anti-Semitism.

The trial took place three years after President Joe Biden said during his 2020 campaign that he would work to end capital punishment at the federal level and in states that still use it, as was reported by the AP.  His attorney general, Merrick Garland, has temporarily paused executions to review policies and procedures. But federal prosecutors continue to vigorously work to uphold already-issued death sentences and, in some cases, to pursue the death penalty at trial for crimes that are eligible, as in Bowers’ case, the AP report indicated.

Tree of Life congregational leaders and those from the national institution dedicated to uprooting anti-Semitism that grew out of the aftermath of the attack thanked Justice Department lawyers and the jurors following the June guilty verdict.

While Porterfield did not formally analyze Bowers or diagnose him with a mental illness, she cited evidence of his deteriorating mental health from his long history of suicidal threats and attempts, psychiatric hospitalizations and prescriptions for antidepressants, as was reported by the AP.

In an ominous foreshadowing of the conspiratorial thinking behind the attack, Bowers said decades ago that he kept a gun in case the United Nations “blue hats” came, according to a co-worker Porterfield cited. The AP reported that Bowers, his own attorneys acknowledge, targeted the synagogue in 2018 out of a belief that Jews were helping to bring immigrants and cause a purported genocide of the white race.

Jurors who last week determined that Bowers is eligible for the death penalty are now hearing arguments on whether aggravating factors that make the crime especially heinous, such as the vulnerability of elderly and disabled victims, outweigh mitigating factors that could be seen as diminishing Bowers’ culpability.

The AP reported that in testimony this week, wounded survivors of the synagogue attack and family members of those killed testified to the devastating effects of the attack on their bodies, emotions and families.

Under cross-examination, Porterfield conceded that most people who have terrible childhoods do not harm others, and that being traumatized does not justify traumatizing others, the AP report said.

Bowers was very active on social media, posting his own similar anti-Semitic and racist rants, as was reported by Wikipedia. He often re-posted content by other similarly minded users, such as Patrick Little, who expressed anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, white nationalist/supremacist thoughts and denied the Holocaust. In addition, he reposted comments in support of the Southern California-based alt-right fight club Rise Above Movement (RAM), whose members had attended the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and were later arrested by the FBI and convicted at trial for violence against counter demonstrators, according to his Wikipedia profile. Bowers also posted comments in support of the “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys (led by Gavin McInnes), who were arrested the same month for engaging in a fight with Antifa outside the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City.

His posts included criticism of former President Donald Trump for being a “globalist, not a nationalist” and for supposedly being surrounded by and controlled by Jews. Wikipedia reported that Bowers also denounced African Americans with racial slurs and images which are related to lynchings, and he also denounced white women who have relationships with black men. The Times said that security sources had alleged that Bowers had links to the far-right and neo-Nazis in the United Kingdom.

A month before the attack, Bowers posted photos of results of his target practice. He also posted a photo of his three handguns, calling them his “glock family”. In the post, he identified the .357 SIG handguns as Glock 31, Glock 32, and Glock 33.

In the weeks before the Pittsburgh shooting, Bowers made anti-Semitic posts directed at the HIAS-sponsored National Refugee Shabbat of October 19–20, in which Dor Hadash participated. He claimed Jews were aiding members of Central American caravans moving toward the United States border and referred to those migrants as “invaders”. Shortly before the attack, he posted on Gab that “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Wikipedia reported that according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “the mention of ‘optics’ references a disagreement that has raged within the white nationalist movement since the Unite the Right rally in 2017 about how best to get their message across to the general public.”

In other news , on Tuesday, the Jewish News Syndicate reported that a Jewish day school in Memphis, Tennessee went into lockdown for about 45 minutes on Monday afternoon after a man fired several shots nearby.

No injuries were reported at the Margolin Hebrew Academy/Feinstone Yeshiva of the South, the JNS.org report said.

The man was shot dead by police.

“We have recently learned that the shooter at the Margolin Hebrew Academy was himself Jewish and a former student at the school,” stated Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.). “I am pleased the academy had effective security and that the police acted quickly to protect students.”

Earlier in the day, the congressman had denounced the “apparent act of violent anti-Semitism.”

At about 12:20 p.m., officers received a call that a white man armed with a handgun was at the school, according to Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn (“C.J.”) Davis.

JNS reported that the man reportedly fired his weapon outside the school. No injuries were reported, and the suspect fled prior to officers’ arrival, according to Davis.

An alert went out to officers across the country for a suspect driving a maroon Dodge Ram pickup truck with Calif. tags, Davis said. When officers conducted a traffic stop on the vehicle, the driver exited armed with a handgun. JNS also reported that a Memphis officer then fired his weapon, hitting the suspect, who was taken to a local hospital in critical condition and eventually died.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating, she added, as was reported by JNS.

The Orthodox school, which enrolls students in pre-kindergarten through grade 12, sent out a message in the early afternoon advising the community that it was “in a developing active shooter situation,” according to Fox 13 News.

“We can confirm that no one has been hurt in any way, and everyone is now safe, thank G-d,” it added. “Our campus is completely closed. Thank you for your understanding.”

Reports on social media stated that the suspect, who has yet to be identified publicly, fired between two and four gunshots.

Michael Masters, national director and CEO of Secure Community Network, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the network “and partners tracked and identified the individual who fired shots at Margolin Hebrew Academy in Memphis.”

Davis said “I am proud of the vigilant and quick response of MPD officers who mitigated a potential mass-shooting situation today. Many thanks to our neighboring jurisdictions for also providing critical information to stop the suspect’s actions.”

(Sources: JNS.org,  AP.com & Wikipedia.org)