At a few minutes before 11 am on Saturday in El Paso, Texas, a gunman in his early 20s opened fire on a crowd of shoppers in a mall killing at least 20 and wounding dozens of others, placing the suspect’s rampage among the top ten deadliest mass shootings in US history.

“I saw people crying: children, old people, all in shock,” one eyewitness told The New York Times. “I saw a baby, maybe six to eight months old, with blood all over the belly.”

As hospitals in the local area deal with what can only be described as the bloody battlefield carnage, federal and state authorities are moving closer towards establishing the suspect’s motive for carrying out the mass casualty attack.

Federal law enforcement investigators have told CNN that they are reviewing writings they believe to have been posted online by the suspect, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old white man from Dallas, but are yet to publicly confirm.