Church gunman's spree brief and ruthless

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, TEXAS • The gunman who committed the massacre in a rural Texas church fired continuously for several minutes, methodically shooting his victims — including small children — in the head, execution-style, a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said on Wednesday.

A video camera captured the bloodbath inside the church, which left 26 people dead and 20 wounded — the worst mass shooting in Texas history — and state and federal investigators have reviewed that gruesome footage. The official estimated that the shooting in the video lasted about seven minutes. The church routinely recorded its services, and often posted the resulting videos online.

The killer, armed with an assault rifle, went to the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs on Sunday morning with magazines capable of holding more than 400 rounds of ammunition, but it is not clear how many shots he actually fired, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

On Wednesday, the Texas Department of Public Safety released the names of the dead — 10 women, seven men, eight children, and the unborn fetus carried by one of the victims, Crystal Holcombe. The youngest of the children was one; the oldest of the adults was 77.

Eight of those gunned down belonged to a single family, the Holcombes and the Hills. One victim, Annabelle Pomeroy, 14, was the pastor’s daughter.

The gunman, Devin P. Kelley, 26, was convicted in 2012, while he was in the Air Force, of assaulting his first wife and her son, a toddler, and he served time in a military prison. Under federal law, that should have prevented him from having firearms, but the Air Force admitted on Monday that it had failed to forward information about his case to the national databases used for gun purchase background checks.

Defense Secretary James Mattis has directed the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General to look into what happened. Several investigations and incidents have shown that the databases, run by the FBI, suffer from spotty reporting of criminal cases by the states and the military.

As Kelley left the church, an armed bystander shot the gunman twice and wounded him, the killer dropped his rifle and fled in his car, and the bystander and another man gave chase. The gunman shot himself in the head,

Law enforcement officials have said that Kelley had an ongoing dispute with the family of his estranged second wife, but they are still trying to determine if anything else led to the slaughter.

Kelley had attended the church in the past, and his mother-in-law was a regular there, though she was not present during the shooting. His wife’s grandmother was one of the people he killed.