14 KIDS AMONG 26 KILLED BY GUNMAN IN TEXAS
Houston, Nov. 6: A court-martialled former US Air Force airman armed with an assault rifle sprayed bullets on worshippers at a Sunday service at a rural church in Texas, killing at least 26 people, including 12-14 children in the latest gunrelated massacre to shock the country.
The 26-year-old suspect, Devin Patrick Kelley, wearing black tacticalstyle gear walked into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs and started firing from an assault rifle just after the Sunday morning service began, officials said.
The victims ranged in age from 5 to 72, and among the dead were 12 to 14 children, Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt told reporters. Twenty people were also injured in the attack.
Sutherland Springs, Texas, Nov. 6: The US was in mourning on Monday after a gunman wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire with an assault rifle on the congregation of a small-town Texas church, killing 26 people, including 12-14 children, and wounding 20 more in the nation’s latest shooting massacre.
Authorities said they believe the gunman fatally shot himself after being chased from the crime scene. The assailant has been formally identified as 26-year-old Devin Kelley.
“At this time we believe that he had a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Wilson county sheriff Joe Tackitt told CBS News.
Mr Tackitt recounted how a local citizen — who was also armed — had engaged, and then pursued the gunman as he exited the First Baptist Church. He said Kelley apparently shot himself after crashing his vehicle.
The Air Force has confirmed that Kelley served at a base in New Mexico starting in 2010 before being court-martialed in 2012 on charges of assaulting his wife and child.
The carnage in Sutherland Springs, a rural community of some 400 people southeast of San Antonio, came just five weeks after the worst gun massacre in modern US history, when a gunman killed 58 people at an open-air concert in Las Vegas.
Monday’s victims ranged in age from five to 72. The massacre killed about four per cent of the small town’s population, CNN reported.
At least eight of the people killed were members of one family, according to a relative and a community leader. A pregnant woman and the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter were among the dead.
Police have identified all but one of the deceased.
Nearly everyone in the church at the time of the shooting had some type of injury, Mr Tackitt said.