“If I have chance, will continue war,” appeared in a scrawl on a notepad, projected onto large TV screens in the courtroom. The image showed a note taken by a psychiatrist in early June as he assessed Robert Bowers, the man who murdered 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.
The overriding feeling in this city now that the gunman convicted of murdering 11 Jews here in 2018 has been sentenced to death is gratitude. Not for the penalty itself, which was the preference of some but not all of the victims’ families and which some local Jews openly opposed, and not even for the end of a trial whose long delay protracted communal trauma.