Widower of US shooting victim invites whole town to funeral

Margie Reckard was one of 22 people killed when a gunman opened fire at a Walmart in the Texas border town on August 3

EL PASO: A large crowd of mourners was expected to attend the funeral on late Friday of a woman whose death in the El Paso mass shooting left her husband with no other family.

Margie Reckard, 63, was one of 22 people killed when a gunman opened fire at a Walmart in the Texas border town on August 3, leaving her husband of more than two decades, Antonio Basco, all alone.

"She made me the happiest man in the world and the luckiest. There's nobody luckier than me in this whole world," Basco told CNN in an interview that aired on Friday.

"I'm looking at the front door just waiting for her to walk in. I've even tried to call her on the phone," Basco said.

Not having any other family, Basco told the Perches Funeral Home, which is arranging his wife's burial, which he wanted to send out an open invitation to the whole town to attend her service on Friday night.

Harrison Johnson, the funeral home director, told National Public Radio that since posting the invitation on Facebook, the site had been visited more than 11,000 times, with more than 1,000 mourners expected to show up.

Deadliest recent mass shootings in the United States

He said his funeral home could only accommodate 250 people and was in talks with a nearby church to host the event.

A GoFundMe site has also raised more than $25,000 in online donations to help support Basco, who runs a mobile car wash business in the town on the US-Mexico border.

"After I found out about his story, there are so many people in need of help and comfort but his story got to me the most, after he told me he was all alone," said the site's organiser Carlos Armendariz, on the fundraising page.

The mass killing was carried out by Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old white man who drove more than nine hours to El Paso to carry out the attack. After his arrest, he told police that he was targeting ‘Mexicans.’

Prior to the shooting, Crusius published a white supremacist manifesto online which expressed fears of a ‘Hispanic invasion’ of Texas.

Critics of US President Donald Trump have accused him of stoking such hatred.