Robert Bowers

In September 2019, prosecutors asked U.S. District judge Donetta Ambrose to set a trial date of Sep 14, 2020. On October 31, 2019, Ambrose declined to set a trial date, pending the resolution of outstanding motions.

On January 29, 2019, the grand jury indicted Bowers on an additional 19 counts, 13 of which were for hate crimes. On February 11, 2019, Bowers was arraigned in federal court. Bowers is represented by defense attorney Judy Clarke. Federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

NFL player Terrell Suggs wore a Star of David on his cleats during a game in October 2019 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the shooting.

The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was a mass shooting that took place on October 27, 2018, at the Tree of Life – Or L'Simcha Congregation in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The congregation, along with New Light Congregation and Congregation Dor Hadash, which also worshipped in the building, was attacked during Shabbat morning services. The shooter killed eleven people and wounded six. It was the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the United States.

This 2018 mass shooting took place soon after Columbia University and the Anti-Defamation League independently reported a spike in anti-Semitic activity online, especially on the popular social networking platforms Instagram and Twitter. In addition, other anti-semitic acts had been committed elsewhere.

The immediate rise in the months of August to October 2018 was attributed to rising tensions associated with advertising for the 2018 US midterm elections. A similar rise in online attacks had occurred during the 2016 US election, with the midterms being a "rallying point" for far-right extremists to organize efforts to spread antisemitism online among the populace. In 2017 there was a 57% rise in antisemitic incidents in the United States, in context of rising hate crimes against other groups, including Muslims and African Americans, as reported by the FBI. For instance, hundreds of Jewish gravestones were vandalized in Pennsylvania and Missouri, and antisemitic incidents on university campuses doubled in number. In August 2017, the widely publicized Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia featured Nazi symbols, salutes, and the slogan "Blood and Soil", amid explicit racist and antisemitic rhetoric. Considerable antisemitic material was being spread online via posted conspiracy theories about wealthy Jewish individuals, including billionaire George Soros. Columbia University's Jon Albright said that these represented the "worst sample" of all the hate speech he had seen on Instagram.

Gab has been described as "extremist friendly" to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right. Bowers registered his Gab profile in January 2018 under the handle "onedingo"; he described his account by the following: "Jews are the children of Satan (John 8:44). The Lord Jesus Christ [has] come in the flesh." The cover picture was a photo with the number 1488, which is used by neo-Nazis and white supremacists to evoke David Lane's "Fourteen Words" and the Nazi slogan Heil Hitler. Bowers published posts that supported the white genocide conspiracy theory, such as one that said, "Daily Reminder: Diversity means chasing down the last white person". Bowers said that supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory were "deluded" and being tricked.

Bowers was active in posting his own offensive remarks and re-posted content by other similarly minded users, such as Patrick Little and /pol/, who expressed anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, white nationalist/supremacist thoughts and were Holocaust deniers. Bowers reposted comments in support of the Southern California-based alt-right fight club Rise Above Movement (RAM), who had attended the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and were later arrested by the FBI and convicted at trial for violence against counter-protestors. Bowers posted support of the "Western chauvinist" Proud Boys (led by Gavin McInnes), who were arrested for violence the same month against Antifa outside the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City. His posts included criticism of US President Donald Trump for being a "globalist, not a nationalist" and for supposedly being surrounded by and controlled by Jews. Bowers also attacked African Americans through racial slurs and images related to lynching, and attacked women who have relationships with black men. He used his online accounts to post conspiracy theories regarding philanthropist George Soros. The Times said that security sources had alleged that Bowers had links to the far-right and neo-Nazis in the United Kingdom.

Tree of Life – Or L'Simcha Congregation is a Conservative Jewish synagogue. The synagogue describes itself as a "traditional, progressive, and egalitarian congregation". It is located in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1 mile (1.6 km) east of Carnegie Mellon University and about 5 miles (8.0 km) east of downtown Pittsburgh. The Squirrel Hill neighborhood is one of the largest predominantly Jewish neighborhoods in the United States and has historically been the center of Pittsburgh's Jewish community. Some 26 percent of the city's Jewish population living in the area.

In the weeks before the shooting, Bowers made anti-Semitic posts directed at the HIAS-sponsored National Refugee Shabbat of October 19–20, in which Dor Hadash participated. He claimed Jews were aiding members of Central American caravans moving toward the United States border and referred to those migrants as "invaders". Shortly before the attack, he posted on Gab that "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in." According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "the mention of 'optics' references a disagreement that has raged within the white nationalist movement since the Unite the Right rally in 2017 about how best to get their message across to the general public".

Jan Kickert, Austrian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said: "The attack ... was an attack on all of us, on what we stand for – religious liberty, human rights. We are committed to the safety and security of Jews wherever they are. I say this with growing up and living with the shame that my forefathers were among the worst perpetrators in Nazi times."

Squirrel Hill has a low crime rate and is not generally regarded as racially tense. But local rabbinic student Neal Rosenblum was murdered in the neighborhood in 1986 in an antisemitic hate crime.

Robert Gregory Bowers (born September 4, 1972), a 46-year-old resident of Baldwin, Pennsylvania, was arrested as the suspected shooter. Bowers's parents divorced when he was about one year old. His father reportedly committed suicide at the age of 27, when Bowers was about 6 years old. Bowers's mother remarried a Florida man when Bowers was a toddler, and he lived with them in Florida until they separated a year after their marriage. Upon returning to Pennsylvania, Robert and his mother lived with his mother's parents in Whitehall. His maternal grandparents took responsibility for raising him, because his mother suffered from health problems. Bowers attended Baldwin High School in the Baldwin-Whitehall School District from August 1986 to November 1989. He dropped out of high school before graduation and worked as a trucker. Neighbors described Bowers as "a ghost" and said he rarely interacted with others.

Originally founded as an Orthodox Jewish congregation in 1864 in downtown Pittsburgh, by an early group of Jewish immigrants, Tree of Life merged in 2010 with the recently founded Congregation Or L'Simcha. The modern synagogue building, located at the intersection of Wilkins and Shady avenues in Squirrel Hill, was built in 1953. The congregation also rents space to Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist congregation; and New Light, another Conservative congregation. The synagogue's main sanctuary has a capacity of 1,250 people.