Texas Church Shooting Leaves at Least 26 Dead, Officials Say
By DAVID MONTGOMERY, CHRISTOPHER MELE and MANNY FERNANDEZ
NOV. 5, 2017
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Tex. — A gunman clad in all black, with a ballistic vest strapped to his chest and a military-style rifle in his hands, opened fire on parishioners at a Sunday service at a small Baptist church in rural Texas, killing at least 26 people and turning this tiny town east of San Antonio into the scene of the country’s newest mass horror.
The gunman was identified as Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing. Mr. Kelley, who lived in New Braunfels, Tex., and had served in the Air Force at a base in New Mexico, died shortly after the attack.
The motive of the attack was unclear on Sunday, but the grisly nature of it could not have been clearer: families gathered in pews, clutching Bibles and praying to the Lord, were murdered in cold blood on the spot.
Mr. Kelley started firing at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs not long after the Sunday morning service began at 11 a.m., officials said. He was armed with a Ruger military-style rifle, and within minutes, many of those inside the small church were either dead or wounded. The victims ranged in age from 5 to 72, and among the dead were several children, a pregnant woman and the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter. It was the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history. At least 20 more were wounded.
“It’s something we all say does not happen in small communities, although we found out today it does,” said Joe Tackitt, the sheriff of Wilson County, which includes Sutherland Springs.
Sheriff Tackitt and other officials said the gunman first stopped at a gas station across Highway 87 from the church. He drove across the street, got out of his car and began firing from the outside, moving to the right side of the church, the authorities said. Then he entered the building and kept firing.
The authorities received their first call about a gunman at about 11:20 a.m.. Officials and witnesses said Mr. Kelley appeared to be prepared for an assault, with black tactical gear, multiple rounds of ammunition and a ballistic vest.
“He went there, he walked in, started shooting people and then took off,” said Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas congressman who represents the region and who was briefed by law enforcement officials.
When Mr. Kelley emerged from the church, an armed neighbor exchanged gunfire with him, hitting Mr. Kelley, who fled in his vehicle. Neighbors apparently followed him, chasing him into the next county, Guadalupe County, where Mr. Kelley crashed his car. Mr. Kelley was found dead in his vehicle. Officials said it was unclear how Mr. Kelley had died.
At the church, he left behind a scene of carnage. Of the 26 fatalities, 23 people were found dead inside the church, two were found outside and one died later at a hospital.
In nearby Floresville, hours after the attack, Scott Holcombe, 30, sat with his sister on the curb outside the emergency room at Connally Memorial Medical Center. They were both in tears. Their parents, Bryan and Karla Holcombe, had been at the church and had been killed.
“I’m dumbfounded,” Mr. Holcombe said. “This is unimaginable. My father was a good man and he loved to preach. He had a good heart.”
His sister, Sarah Slavin, 33, added: “They weren’t afraid of death. They had a strong faith, so there’s comfort in that. I feel like my parents, especially my mom, wasn’t scared.”
A parishioner, Sandy Ward, said that a daughter-in-law and three of her grandchildren were shot. Her grandson, who is 5, was shot four times and remained in surgery Sunday night. She said she was awaiting word on her other family members.
Ms. Ward said she did not attend services on Sunday because of her troubled knees and a bad hip. “I just started praying for everybody who was there” when she learned of the shooting, she said.
At a news conference on Sunday, Gov. Greg Abbott said that he and other Texans were asking “for God’s comfort, for God’s guidance and for God’s healing for all those who are suffering.”
President Trump, who was in Japan on a trip to several Asian countries, called it a “horrific shooting.”
In a time of crisis, he said, “Americans will do what we do best: we pull together and join hands and lock arms and through the tears and sadness we stand strong.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were helping in the investigation, which was being led by the Texas Rangers.
The shooting unfolded on the eighth anniversary of the attack in 2009 on Fort Hood in Texas, when an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, killed 13 people in one of the deadliest mass shootings at an American military base. Major Hasan carried out his attack in an attempt to wage jihad on American military personnel.
The death toll on Sunday also exceeded the number killed in 1966 by a student at the University of Texas at Austin, Charles Whitman, who opened fire from the school’s clock tower in a day of violence in that ultimately killed 17.
And the shooting on Sunday occurred more than two years after Dylann S. Roof opened fire at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015, killing nine people, including the pastor. The motive in that attack was racial hatred — Mr. Roof, a white supremacist, plotted an assault on a black congregation — but no motive has been established by the authorities in the shooting in Sutherland Springs. The First Baptist Church is predominantly white, and Mr. Kelley is white.
The authorities said Mr. Kelley used an Ruger AR-15 variant — a knockoff of the standard service rifle carried by the American military for roughly half a century.
Almost all AR-15 variants legally sold in the United States fire only semiautomatically, and were covered by the federal assault weapons ban that went into effect in 1994. Since the ban expired in 2004, the weapons have been legal to sell or possess in much of the United States and sales of AR-15s have surged.
Ruger’s AR-15s made for civilian markets sell for about $500 to $900, depending on the model.
Mr. Kelley grew up in New Braunfels, in his parents’ nearly $1 million home, and was married in 2014. Why he chose to attack a church 30 miles away is one of the questions that remained unanswered.
Sutherland Springs in Wilson County is about 34 miles east of downtown San Antonio, in a slow-paced region where church-going is a common part of the Sunday routine. The church marquee on Sunday needed updating from last week, reading, “Join Us, Fall Fest, Oct 31, 6 to 8 PM.”
The unincorporated community has a population that numbers in the low hundreds — the 2000 census was 362, according to the Texas State Historical Association. The preliminary death toll would amount to about 7 percent of that population.
Joseph Silva, 49, who lives about five miles northeast of Sutherland Springs, said the police had instructed his family and neighbors to stay indoors. He described Sutherland Springs as “a one-blinking-light town.”
“There is a gas station and a post office,” he said. “That’s about all there really is.”
Mr. Silva said he had been approached by a woman who said she had two loved ones at the church who were shot. “There are a number of individuals just weeping and just wanted to know what’s happened to their loved ones,” he said. “Everybody is pretty grief-stricken. Everyone’s worried.”
Hours after the shootings, the one-story church was sealed off to reporters, with yellow tape posted around the church grounds. Far beyond the town, the shooting shocked people throughout Texas, a state that is home to some of the biggest churches in the country.
The First Baptist Church of La Vernia, about seven miles away, wrote on Facebook that it would open its doors from 5 to 7 p.m. “There will be pastors and leaders present to pray with you or to talk, and the altar will be open for us to fall at the feet of Jesus,” the church wrote.
First Baptist is a little church, albeit a tech-savvy one. The service at the church last Sunday was posted on YouTube, one of several posted there. Videos posted online show lyrics to the hymns appearing on television screens with parishioners playing electric guitars and a sign language interpreter translating the songs.
The video of last Sunday’s service begins with a rendition of a song called “Happiness Is the Lord.” Then the pastor, Frank Pomeroy, told his parishioners — 20 to 30 were visible in the video — to walk around the room and “shake somebody’s hand.”
“Tell them it’s good to see them in God’s house this morning,” Pastor Pomeroy said.
