(File Photo: Source for Photo: Police respond to an active shooter situation at the Tree of Life synagogue on Wildins Avenue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pa., on Saturday, October 27, 2018. (Pam Panchak/Post-Gazette via AP)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Pittsburgh, PA) Today is the seven-year anniversary of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in the history of the United States, when forty-six-year-old Robert Gregory Bowers shot and killed eleven people and wounded six others at the Tree of Life Congregation synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. A commemoration ceremony this evening at 6:30 p.m. at the Jewish Community center in Squirrel Hill will remember the victims of that October 27th, 2018 attack. There will also be prayer and song, as well as a speech from a keynote speaker who was a Pittsburgh police commander at the time of the shooting, Jason Lando. Bowers was arrested at the scene of the shooting after being shot multiple times by police and he was charged with sixty-three federal crimes, with some of them being capital crimes. Even though Bowers pleaded not guilty on November 1st, 2018, he was found guilty on all counts on June 16th, 2023 and was then sentenced to death by lethal injection.