Squirrel Hill sits a few miles east of downtown Pittsburgh, a neighborhood of narrow streets, old brick homes, and a Jewish community that had lived there for generations. At the corner of Wilkins and Shady Avenues stood a building that three congregations called home, Tree of Life, Door Hadash, and New Light.

 They did not share a single service. They shared a roof, a set of rooms, and a Saturday morning routine that had repeated itself for years without incident. October 27th, 2018 began the same way it always had. Inside, members of all three congregations had gathered for Shabbat morning prayers. Rose Malinger was 97 years old, and she had come with her daughter, Andrea Wedner, seated beside her, the way they usually sat.

 Melvin Wax was 87, a fixture of new light who almost never missed a Saturday. Bernice and Silvin Simon, married for decades, sat together as they always did. Richard Gotfrieded, a dentist who had spent his career treating patients across the city, was there with his wife. Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, a physician remembered by many of his patients for his kindness during the height of the AIDS crisis decades earlier, had come to pray.

 Joyce Fenberg, a longtime member of Tree of Life, sat with people she had known for years. Cecil Rosenthal and his younger brother David, both members of the congregation, had arrived together, as they often did. Daniel Stein and Irving Younger were there as well, part of the same familiar Saturday crowd.

 None of them had reason to expect anything unusual that morning. It was an ordinary act repeated on an ordinary weekend in a building that had never given them cause for concern. At 9:50 a.m., a gray Hyundai pulled up outside the synagogue. A man got out carrying a Colt AR-15 rifle and three Glock fast 357 handguns.

His name was Robert Bowers. He was 46 years old. And in the minutes before he opened the car door, he had already published a message online. It named a Jewish refugee organization. It accused that organization of bringing people into the country who, in his words, were killing his people.

 Then he wrote three words. I’m going in. He walked toward the entrance and fired at a window near the front doors. The glass shattered. He stepped inside. For the people gathered in prayer, the gunfire came without warning. Some understood immediately what was happening. Others had only seconds. Bowers moved through the building, firing his rifle. People ran.

People hid in closets, in offices, beneath furniture, wherever there was space to disappear. Within minutes, police radios across Squirrel Hill were carrying reports of an active shooter inside a synagogue. Officers arrived to a scene they could not yet fully see. They knew a gunman was somewhere inside a building that housed three separate congregations with worshippers scattered through its rooms, hallways, and stairwells.

 As they approached, Bowers turned his rifle on them. Five officers would be wounded in the effort to reach him. Pittsburgh SWAT teams eventually entered the building, moving room to room while the gunfire continued, trying to find survivors before they found the shooter himself. Bowers eventually retreated to the third floor and barricaded himself in a room.

 The standoff continued until officers wounded him in an exchange of gunfire and took him into custody alive. When the shooting stopped, 11 people were dead. Two more had been critically wounded. 12 congregants who had been inside the building at the time survived without physical injury, carrying instead the memory of what they had heard and seen.

 Joyce Fenberg, Richard Gotfrieded, Rose Malinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Silvin Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger did not survive the morning. Investigators would later reconstruct the attack minuteby minute using surveillance footage, radio traffic, and the accounts of survivors scattered throughout the building.

 The shooting did not stay confined to one room. Bowers moved through hallways and between spaces used by different congregations, which meant that people who had gathered for entirely separate services found themselves caught in the same attack. Some worshippers made it out through side exits before officers even arrived.

 Others spent the length of the standoff hidden in places never designed to conceal anyone. Supply closets, a kitchen, a rabbi’s study, waiting for a signal that it was safe to move. To understand how that morning came to happen, the story has to go back decades to a childhood that gave almost no indication of where it would eventually lead.

 Robert Gregory Bowers was born in Pennsylvania in 1972. His parents separated while he was still a young child and the years that followed were unstable. When he was seven, his father died by suicide. It was one of several events that would later be examined in detail by psychologists retained by his defense team, though at the time it registered only as another disruption in an already unsettled home.

 Court records compiled years later during the penalty phase of his federal trial described a childhood marked by aggression, emotional instability, and repeated psychiatric intervention. According to those records, Bowers exhibited suicidal behavior as a child and was hospitalized more than once. His family struggled to manage him as he grew older, and the problems did not resolve with time.

 By adolescence, he had already experienced a level of psychiatric treatment that most children never encounter. hospitalizations, medication, and periods of institutional care that defense experts would later site as evidence of a mind in crisis long before it ever fixed on a political or religious target.

 Defense experts who later reviewed these records for trial described a pattern consistent in their clinical opinion with the early emergence of serious mental illness, the kind that left undiagnosed or undertreated through childhood and early adulthood can deepen over decades rather than resolve on its own. They pointed to the absence of any sustained stable psychiatric care in Bower’s adult life as a gap that allowed whatever illness he had developed as a child to progress largely unmonitored and untreated for years before 2018.

The defense’s argument presented years later in court was never that this childhood made his crime inevitable. It was that the instability, the mental illness in his family and his own documented psychiatric history formed the backdrop against which something more serious eventually developed. Bowers left high school without graduating.

 As an adult, he worked a series of jobs, including time spent driving trucks. For years, nothing about his public life distinguished him from millions of other Americans living ordinary, unremarkable lives. He was not politically active in any visible way. He held no public platform, belonged to no organization, and drew no attention from law enforcement.

 He was on the surface unremarkable. What was changing, largely out of view, was what he believed. None of his co-workers, neighbors, or former acquaintances who later spoke to reporters, described a man who had announced his views loudly or often in person. The radicalization that eventually led him to the tree of lifebuilding took shape mostly online in a space where he could find and be found by other people who shared his views without the friction of ever having to say those things to someone’s face.

 By 2018, Bowers had become an active user of Gab, a social media platform that had drawn a following among people expressing far-right and extremist views. in part because larger platforms had begun removing similar content. His posts on the platform, later gathered and cataloged by federal investigators, chart a clear progression over time.

 He wrote about immigration policy. He wrote about Jewish organizations and their role in American public life. He began repeating anti-semitic conspiracy theories that cast Jewish people not merely as a group he disagreed with politically, but as an active and organized threat responsible for what he believed was happening to the country’s demographics and culture.

 One organization drew his attention more than any other. Hias, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a group founded in the late 19th century to help Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Europe find their footing in the United States. Over the following century, the organization’s mission broadened. By the time of the Tree of Life shooting, Hias worked with refugees from around the world, regardless of their religion.

Resettling families fleeing war and persecution across multiple continents. Its history and its continued involvement in refugee resettlement had made it for decades one of the most visible Jewish organizations connected to American immigration policy. To Bowers, he represented the mechanism by which he believed immigrants were being brought into the country to displace the population he considered his own.

 His posts about the organization grew more frequent and more hostile as the months passed, often invoking the same conspiratorial language used by extremist movements to describe Jewish involvement in immigration and refugee policy. The Tree of Life building was not a random target. It housed three congregations and one of them Dor Hadash had participated in programming connected to refugee resettlement work associated with HAS, including a national refugee Shabbat event held in the weeks before the attack.

Investigators would later argue that this connection was central to why Bowowers chose that specific building on that specific morning rather than any other synagogue in the region. On the morning of October 27th, before he ever got into his car, Bowers posted his final message. He referenced Hias by name.

 He wrote that the organization brought in what he called invaders who, in his telling, kill his people. He wrote that he could not sit by and watch his people be slaughtered. Then came the three words that would later be read aloud in a federal courtroom. I’m going in. The post appeared online. Then he drove to the synagogue.

 Gab itself would become part of the story in the days that followed. The platform had built a reputation as a haven for users banned from larger social networks for hate speech. And in the aftermath of the shooting, several payment processors and web hosting companies cut ties with the site entirely, temporarily forcing it offline.

 But by then, investigators already had what they needed. Bower’s account had not been anonymous in any meaningful sense. His posts were tied to his name, his location, and a consistent pattern of escalating hostility that stretched back months before anyone outside that platform had reason to notice him. By the time investigators finished identifying the dead, they had assembled 11 separate lives, each interrupted in the same building within the same few minutes.

 Joyce Fenberg was 75, a longtime member of the Tree of Life community, who had spent decades embedded in Pittsburgh’s Jewish life after moving to the city years earlier. Richard Gotfrieded, 65, was a dentist who had built a career serving patients throughout the region, working alongside his wife, who also survived him.

 Rose Malinger, at 97, was the oldest of the 11. Her daughter, Andrea Wedner, was seated beside her when the shooting began and survived her own injuries. Dr. Jerry Rabininoitz, 66, was a physician remembered by former patients and colleagues for his dedication, including his willingness to treat AIDS patients at a time when many other doctors would not.

 Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and his younger brother David, 54, were both members of the congregation and both died in the same attack. Two brothers who had spent their Saturday mornings together for years. Bernice Simon, 84, and her husband Silvin, 86, were killed together, a married couple who had shared decades of life and lost their final morning in the same room.

 Daniel Stein, 71, was a member of the New Light congregation. Melvin Wax, 87, had been a devoted member of New Light for years, known for rarely missing a service. Irving Younger, 69, was also a member of New Light. The youngest of the 11 was 54. The oldest was 97. They were physicians, spouses, siblings, parents, and grandparents.

 What connected them was not any single characteristic beyond the building they had chosen to enter that morning, for the same reason they had entered it countless mornings before. Two congregants inside the building that morning survived critical injuries. 12 more who had been present escaped physical harm entirely, though they would later testify about what they experienced in the minutes the shooting lasted.

 Among them was Andrea Wedner, who was wounded while seated next to her mother, Rose Malinger, and who would later describe for the jury what it meant to survive an attack that her mother did not. The first 911 calls reached Pittsburgh police within moments of the initial shots. Officers arriving at the scene had almost no information beyond the basic fact that a gunman was firing inside a building occupied by three congregations at once with worshippers scattered through offices, sanctuaries, and stairwells they had never mapped for a tactical response. As

the first officers approached the building, Bowers fired on them. The exchange wounded several responding officers before Pittsburgh’s SWAT team arrived and began the more dangerous work of clearing the building room by room, searching for survivors, while a gunman remained active somewhere inside. Every additional minute Bowowers spent moving through the synagogue increased the risk to anyone still hidden within it.

 Bowowers eventually retreated to the third floor where he barricaded himself. The standoff that followed ended only when officers wounded him during an exchange of gunfire, allowing them to take him into custody alive rather than in a final confrontation that could have gone differently for everyone involved. He was transported for medical treatment.

 By the time the building was declared secure, five police officers had been wounded during the response. Two congregants had suffered critical injuries. 11 others had not survived at all. Bowowers was taken to a hospital under guard for treatment of his own gunshot wounds before being formally taken into federal custody. Within hours, agents from the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office had opened what would become one of the largest domestic terrorism and hate crime investigations the bureau had conducted in years.

Search warrants were executed at his home and on his vehicle. His phone and computers were seized. Every weapon recovered from the scene was traced through its full ownership history, confirming that Bowers had purchased each of them legally over a period of years with no criminal record that would have prevented the sales.

 Digital forensic teams worked through months of archived posts, messages, and account activity, building a searchable timeline that let investigators and eventually prosecutors trace the exact evolution of his stated beliefs week by week. That timeline became one of the most important pieces of evidence in the case because it let the government show not just what Bowers believed on the morning of the attack, but how those beliefs had hardened and narrowed over the months leading up to it, moving from general grievances about immigration policy

toward a specific named target. The investigation that followed the shooting moved in multiple directions at once. Federal agents and Pittsburgh police worked the crime scene, collected the recovered weapons, and began reconstructing Bower’s movements in the days and hours before the attack. They pulled his online history from Gab and began cataloging the hundreds of posts that traced his radicalization over the preceding months.

 They interviewed survivors, first responders, and witnesses who had been inside the building when the shooting began. The government’s theory of the case rested on two connected pillars. The physical evidence of what happened inside the synagogue and the digital record of what Bowowers had said before he ever arrived.

 Prosecutors would later argue that his final post published minutes before the attack closed the gap between belief and action in a way few cases ever allow investigators. There was no need to reconstruct motive from circumstantial evidence. Bowers had written it down himself in his own words immediately before acting on it. On January 2nd, 2019, a federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment charging Bowowers with 63 counts, an expansion from the original 44ount indictment filed shortly after his arrest. 11 counts charged him with

obstructing the free exercise of religious belief, resulting in death. 11 more were hate crime counts resulting in death. Additional counts covered the attempted murder of the survivors inside the building and the officers wounded during the response along with 25 separate firearms charges tied to his use of weapons during the commission of a violent crime.

 The case would go on to become one of the largest federal death penalty prosecutions in modern American history, both in the number of charges filed and in the scope of the evidence eventually presented at trial. Attorney General approval is required before federal prosecutors can pursue a death sentence in any case.

 a formal process that runs through the Department of Justice’s Capital Case Review Committee in Washington before local prosecutors are authorized to proceed. That authorization came only after the department had reviewed the full case file, including the digital evidence, the ballistics, and the preliminary information about Bower’s mental health history that his attorneys had already begun raising.

 At some point during the years of pre-trial proceedings that followed, Bower’s legal team made an offer to prosecutors. He would plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, removing the death penalty from consideration entirely. The Department of Justice declined the offer.

 The case would go to trial and it would remain a capital case from beginning to end. The decision to reject the plea was not made in isolation. Federal death penalty cases require signoff from the Department of Justice in Washington, a process that involves a formal review of the evidence, the aggravating and mitigating factors, and input from the local US attorney’s office.

 That review concluded that the scale of the crime, 11 murders motivated by religious hatred carried out inside a house of worship, warranted pursuing the maximum available punishment rather than accepting a guaranteed sentence of life without parole. In the years between the indictment and the trial, both sides also fought over where the trial itself would take place.

 Bower’s attorneys sought a change of venue, arguing that a jury drawn from the Pittsburgh area could not be impartial given the intense local and national coverage of the shooting. Prosecutors opposed the request, arguing that Bowers could still receive a fair trial in the district where the crime occurred. The court agreed with the government and jury selection proceeded in the Western District of Pennsylvania, the same district where the shooting had taken place.

 Pre-trial proceedings also included disputes over Bower’s own legal rights within the case. At one point, prosecutors asked the court to question Bowers directly to confirm that he understood his attorneys were waving certain civil claims on his behalf as part of the broader defense strategy. A request that underscored how central the question of his mental competency and understanding would remain throughout the case.

 long before the penalty phase ever put expert witnesses on the stand to argue about his diagnosis. Leading Bower’s defense was Judy Clark, an attorney with decades of experience representing defendants in some of the country’s highest profile capital cases. Her past clients had included Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother convicted of drowning her two young sons, Ted Kazinski, known as the Uniomber, Jared Laughofner, who shot and killed six people and wounded then Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, and Jokar Sarnav convicted in

the Boston Marathon bombing. In several of those cases, Clark’s clients avoided execution, either through a plea agreement or a jury’s decision during the penalty phase, a track record that had made her one of the most sought-after capital defense attorneys in the country. Her strategy was built less around disputing guilt and more around humanizing defendants during the penalty phase that follows conviction.

Clark’s approach with Bowers followed the same pattern. She did not dispute what had happened inside the synagogue. The physical evidence, the recovered weapons, the surveillance footage, the eyewitness accounts, the digital trail made that impossible. Instead, her strategy centered on the years before the shooting, the childhood instability, the repeated psychiatric hospitalizations, the family history of mental illness and suicide, and the argument that Bowers suffered from serious long-standing psychiatric

illness that had shaped both his beliefs and his eventual actions. The prosecution, led by federal attorneys pursuing the death penalty, prepared a case built around planning and deliberate intent. Bowers had researched his target over a period of months. He had legally acquired his weapons years before the attack.

 He had driven to the synagogue with a clear ideological grievance already published online for anyone to read. In the government’s account, none of that behavior was consistent with a man who lacked the capacity to understand what he was doing or why he was doing it. Both sides spent years preparing their competing narratives.

 Jury selection did not begin until April 2023, more than 4 and 1/2 years after the shooting itself. Time spent litigating pre-trial motions, evaluating potential jurors for bias in a case that had drawn national attention, and assembling the medical and forensic evidence each side would eventually present. Selecting a jury for a capital case of this size proved to be its own lengthy undertaking.

 Because the case involved the possibility of a death sentence, every prospective juror had to be individually questioned about their views on capital punishment, a process known as death qualification, before either side could begin narrowing the pool further. A juror who stated they could never vote to impose death or who stated they would automatically vote for death regardless of the evidence could be excluded for cause.

 Attorneys spent weeks working through hundreds of potential jurors before 12 along with a group of alternates were finally seated. It was this process more than a year later that would become one of the central grounds for Bower’s appeal with his lawyers arguing that specific jurors had been improperly excluded or included based on their answers during this questioning.

 The guilt phase opened on May 30th, 2023. Over the following weeks, prosecutors called 60 witnesses and introduced more than 650 exhibits. The recovered weapons, crime scene photographs, digital records pulled from Bower’s online accounts, ballistics evidence connecting specific shots to specific injuries, and testimony from survivors and the officers who had entered the building under fire.

 Bower’s defense team did not call witnesses during this phase of the trial, and they did not seriously dispute the core facts the government presented. He had killed 11 people. He had wounded others both inside the building and among the responding officers. The attack had been planned rather than spontaneous, built on months of stated intent rather than a sudden, unexplained impulse.

 What his lawyers contested was narrower and more technical. whether the government had proven every legal element required for each of the 63 federal charges. A distinct question from the broader largely undisputed question of what had actually happened inside the building on October 27th. For the families in the courtroom, the guilt phase meant sitting through a detailed, methodical presentation of exactly how their relatives had died, the sequence of gunshots, the paths people took trying to escape, the moment officers finally

located each victim. Survivors described what they had seen and heard from inside closets and offices. Police officers described entering a building where a gunman was still actively firing, not knowing how many more people remained in danger. The evidence built steadily toward a conclusion that was by that point in the trial not seriously in question.

 Prosecutors walked the jury through the ballistics evidence connecting specific rounds fired from Bower’s rifle to the injuries suffered by each of the 11 victims, establishing beyond dispute which shots had killed whom. They introduced the surveillance and body camera footage capturing the police response, showing officers advancing into gunfire without knowing how many attackers they might be facing or how many victims remained alive inside.

 They played the recordings of Bower’s own statements to police and hospital staff following his arrest, in which he expressed hostility toward Jewish people without ambiguity. On June 16th, 2023, after three weeks of testimony, the jury returned its verdict. Guilty on all 63 counts. The trial’s next phase would decide something the first had not, whether Bowers would live or die for what he had done.

 Federal law requires that before a jury can even consider a death sentence, it must first find that a defendant is legally eligible for one, a determination that weighs specific aggravating factors against any mitigating evidence the defense presents. It was in this eligibility phase that the mental health case Bowowers’s lawyers had been building for years finally reached the jury in full.

Nine witnesses testified for the defense. all of them medical doctors or psychologists who had examined Bowers, his medical records, and his family history. Their testimony described a man they diagnosed with schizophrenia and epilepsy along with what they characterized as significant, measurable brain impairment.

 They discussed patterns of delusional thinking and argued that his fixation on Jewish people and Jewish organizations had developed at least in part as an expression of underlying psychiatric illness rather than a coherent political ideology arrived at through ordinary reasoning. Crucially, the defense did not argue that Bowers had been legally insane at the moment of the attack, a distinct and far narrower legal standard that would have required showing he could not understand the nature of his actions at all. Their argument was more

limited, that his documented, decadesl long psychiatric history should weigh against imposing the ultimate punishment. The government responded with its own experts. 11 witnesses in total during the eligibility phase, including two called specifically to rebut the defense’s diagnosis. They disputed the schizophrenia diagnosis directly and argued that whatever psychological difficulties Bowers had experienced over his lifetime did not prevent him from planning, understanding, or carrying out the attack with clear and deliberate intent.

Prosecutors pointed to the months of escalating coherent posts about a specific organization, the selection of a target directly connected to that specific grievance, the timing of his final message immediately before the attack, and his conduct during the shooting itself, moving methodically through the building, engaging responding officers, attempting to avoid capture rather than surrendering as evidence of a man who understood exactly what he was doing and I jury heard both accounts in full along with cross-examination that tested each

side’s experts on their methods and conclusions. Defense experts were pressed on how a diagnosis of schizophrenia could coexist with the months of methodical planning the government had already proven during the guilt phase. Government experts in turn were pressed on whether they had spent enough time directly examining Bowers themselves rather than relying primarily on a review of his records.

 On July 13th, 2023, the jury found Bowowers eligible for the death penalty. The case moved into its final and most consequential phase. The sentence selection phase stretched over nearly 2 weeks. The prosecution reiterated the scale of the crime in its closing arguments. 11 murders carried out inside a place of worship against victims targeted specifically because of their religion with police officers wounded in the effort to stop him and two congregants left with critical lasting injuries. The defense returned once more

to the mitigating case it had built from Bower’s early life, the childhood instability, the suicide attempts, the repeated psychiatric hospitalizations, the family history that, in their argument, had shaped a mind capable of profound delusion long before it ever settled on Jewish people and Jewish institutions as its target.

 Federal capital sentencing requires the jury to weigh a formal list of aggravating factors against whatever mitigating evidence the defense presents rather than simply voting on instinct. Among the aggravating factors prosecutors argued applied in Bowowers’s case were that the killings were committed against multiple victims in a single act, that he had demonstrated a lack of remorse, that the victims were particularly vulnerable given their ages, and that he had targeted them specifically because of their religion. The defense’s

mitigating factors centered on his mental illness, his childhood trauma, and the argument that a life sentence without parole would still ensure he never had the opportunity to harm anyone again. A death sentence under federal law requires unonymity. Every member of the jury has to agree without exception before the punishment can be imposed.

 On August 1, 2023, they did. The jury recommended death. Two days later, on August 3rd, the judge formally imposed the sentence in open court after victims and family members delivered impact statements describing what the loss of their relatives had meant to them. Bowowers received death sentences on 22 of the 63 counts.

 He was transferred into federal custody as a condemned prisoner. Eventually arriving at the US Penitentiary in Teroot, Indiana, the facility where federal executions are carried out. For the families who had sat through both phases of the trial, first the detailed accounting of how their relatives died. Then the extended argument over whether the man responsible should live or die.

 The verdict closed one chapter of a process that had already lasted nearly five years. It did not close the case itself. Outside the courthouse, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh issued a statement saying it would stand with the families and survivors of the attack for as long as it took and describing the verdict as reflecting the gravity of what had happened inside the synagogue.

Inside the building on Wilkins Avenue, the congregations that had shared the space before October 27th, 2018 faced a question none of them had ever expected to confront. Whether and how to return to a building that had become the site of the deadliest anti-semitic attack in the country’s history.

 In the days immediately following the shooting, thousands of people gathered in Squirrel Hill and across Pittsburgh for vigils. Political and religious leaders, including then President Donald Trump, visited the city in the aftermath, though members of the affected congregations were divided over the visit itself.

 National attention on the case continued through the years that followed as prosecutors built their case and as debate over hate crimes, gun laws, and the safety of houses of worship played out well beyond Pittsburgh. That broader public conversation ran parallel to but separate from the specific legal case against Bowers, which remained focused narrowly on what he had done and why.

The building itself did not remain as it was on the morning of the attack. In January 2024, roughly 80% of the original structure was demolished with crews working to preserve the sanctuary’s historic limestone walls and stained glass windows rather than clearing the site entirely. The Tree of Life organization working with architect Daniel Libuskind spent years developing a design that would combine a smaller worship space with an education center, a museum focused on the history of anti-semitism in the United States and

an outdoor memorial designed with input from the victim’s families and representatives of all three congregations that had used the building. The project’s cost estimates ran into the tens of millions of dollars funded through donations and in part federal appropriations directed toward the rebuild and toward a separate nonprofit supporting survivors ongoing mental health needs.

 As of the final design unveiled in 2026, organizers were targeting a soft opening for congregational use in the fall of 2027, nearly a decade after the shooting, with the museum and memorial following in 2028. A federal death sentence is automatically subject to appeal, and Bower’s legal team began that process almost immediately after sentencing.

 His initial post-trial motions were denied by the district judge in early 2024 with the court describing several of the defenses arguments as without merit. His federal public defenders then spent roughly 2 years preparing a formal appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, an opening brief that ultimately ran to nearly 500 pages and raised more than a dozen distinct claims of error.

 among them that the trial court improperly excluded certain prospective jurors while improperly seating another, that the defense was not given adequate time to challenge those jury decisions before the trial began, and that Bowers was shackled during part of the proceedings based on unproven concerns relayed by US marshals.

 a decision his lawyers argue prejudiced the jury against him before a single word of testimony had been heard on the question of his mental state. His attorneys have also challenged the constitutionality of the federal hate crime statute under which he was convicted and have argued more broadly that the trial record does not support the conclusion that anti-semitism was the primary motive behind the attack.

 a claim that stands in direct tension with both the physical evidence recovered from the scene and Bower’s own extensive record of online statements. The Department of Justice has filed its answering brief defending the convictions and the sentence while separately acknowledging in light of an intervening Supreme Court decision affecting certain firearms related capital counts that some of the death sentences tied specifically to those counts may need to be vacated.

 The core death sentences tied to the 11 murders themselves remain in the government’s argument unaffected by that narrower issue. Legal scholars following the case have noted that the appeal, even at this stage, is really only beginning. Resolution before the third circuit, and any subsequent appeals that may follow it, is expected to take years rather than months.

 Attorneys for Bowers have said the shackling issue in particular took months to fully understand since the reasoning behind the decision was not disclosed to the defense until well after the trial concluded. According to court filings described publicly, US marshals told prison officials they believed Bowowers had made efforts to close the distance between himself and an armed deputy during the proceedings and that corrections officers at the Butler County Jail, where he was held, reported he had told them he knew which staff members were armed and believed he

could disarm them. The defense argues that shackling him without disclosing those reasons at the time deprived his lawyers of the chance to challenge the decision before the jury ever saw him in restraints and that the visible restraints themselves may have influenced how jurors perceived him during the guilt phase.

 A law professor who has followed the case closely told reporters that the appellet process now underway is in a practical sense only just getting started and that resolution is likely to take years rather than months given the size of the record, the number of claims raised and the near certainty that whichever side loses at the third circuit will seek further review.

 Robert Bowers remains on federal death row as that process continues. No execution date has been set and none can be until the appeals working their way through the federal courts are resolved. The 11 names read into the record during his trial. Joyce Fenberg, Richard Gotfrieded, Rose Malinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Silvin Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger remain at the center of a legal case that has already run for more than 7 years and shows no sign of a final resolution. The shooting itself lasted

only minutes. The investigation took years. The trial took months. The appeal, by every account from the attorneys and legal scholars following it, will take longer still. The building where it happened still stands at the corner of Wilkins and Shady Avenues. What happens next in Bowowers’s case will be decided not in Pittsburgh, but in the appellet courts in briefs hundreds of pages long over a period likely to stretch years beyond the one it already has.

 Until then, the record of what happened on the morning of October 27th, 2018 remains exactly as the jury found it. 11 counts of murder, 63 counts in total, one unanimous verdict, and one sentence of death. Still pending, still appealed, still unresolved.