On May 13, the same thing happened at St. Patrick Cathedral. And June 15, authorities said, an incendiary device was thrown into the San Judas Tadeo Catholic Church, burning the church’s back pews.
The three cases of arson on the city’s west side remain unsolved, but authorities believe they are connected. On Thursday, the FBI said it would offer up to a $15,000 reward for information that leads to the identification or arrest of the person or people responsible.
Nobody was inside the buildings during the arsons and, aside from the pews at San Judas Tadeo, the churches escaped serious damage, according to the Catholic Diocese of El Paso.
Still, the crimes forced the city to confront adversity, two months before a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso left 22 dead, said Fernando Ceniceros, a spokesman for the diocese. Concerned residents banded together to help fix the churches and donate supplies.
“It wasn’t so much a sense of fear; it was more a sense of coming together,” he said. “Eerily enough, two months later we’d see that on a much larger scale in El Paso.”
Ceniceros said in all three arsons, which took place in the early morning, it looked as if someone had tried to throw something similar to a Molotov cocktail into the churches through the windows. A spokeswoman for the FBI declined Sunday to be more specific about the type of weapon used, beyond calling it an “incendiary device.”
In the Walmart shooting, which does not appear to be linked to the arsons, the man accused of carrying out the attack confessed that he had targeted Mexican people, police have said.
The FBI declined Sunday to comment on a motive for the arsons. Ceniceros said the diocese did not have any reason to believe that the churches were targeted because of the race or ethnicity of the congregations, which are heavily Latino, like the city of El Paso.
In the arson at St. Matthew, the device missed the church window and bounced off a wall, falling to the ground and scorching the sidewalk outside. At St. Patrick, the device hit a window, breaking part of it, but still bounced off the glass and hit the sidewalk.
At San Judas, someone broke a window and then threw a device inside, burning the pews in the back of the church and charring the ceiling, Ceniceros said.
“If it’s assumed that it’s the same perpetrator doing this, every attack, every attempted arson got better, if you will,” Ceniceros said.
He said the church was also offering a $5,000 reward in addition to the FBI’s reward.
“Just so that we have a sense of closure, if you will,” he said. “We want a resolution to this.”
This article originally appeared in
.