How was he missed? Menacing Texas church gunman left series of red flags
There were no shortage of red flags warning of the volatility of the Texas church gunman. In the years leading up to Sunday’s horrific assault that left 26 dead and 20 more wounded, Devin Kelley cracked his 1-year-old stepson’s skull, menaced his former wife, was accused of sexual assault, had a history of stalking former girlfriends and escaped from a mental health facility.
Long before he walked into the Sutherland Springs’ First Baptist Church, victims of Kelley’s rage – and those who simply crossed his path – repeatedly told authorities that he was a dangerous man.
“Everything we know about domestic violence predicted this could happen,” said Lori Post, a researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who studies domestic violence. “This is not mental illness. He has a personality disorder, and that disorder is consistent with psychopathy, given prior charges of domestic violence, animal abuse and sexual predatory behavior.”
On Tuesday, law enforcement officials continued to investigate what led to Kelley’s gruesome attack at the church – he even reportedly shot at crying children in the pews – as more reports of the gunman’s violent and disconcerting behavior continued to surface.
Investigators say he was entangled in a family dispute ahead of the shooting and sent threatening text messages to his mother-in-law, who was a member of the church whose congregants he assaulted.
But interviews and publicly available documents reveal his penchant for violence had boiled for years.
Kelley escaped from a mental health facility in New Mexico in June 2012 before being caught in El Paso, Texas, according to a police department report obtained by USA TODAY. That incident occurred after Kelley, a former member of the US Air Force, was charged by military authorities for beating his wife and stepson, leaving the boy with a fractured skull, but before he was sentenced to a year in the brig.
Kelley escaped from the Peak Behavioral Health Services Center in Santa Teresa, NM, fleeing a few miles across the state line to El Paso. In the police report, Kelley was described to authorities by an unnamed witness as “a danger to himself and others as he had already been caught sneaking firearms onto Hollomon Air Force Base.”
The witness told police that Kelley “was attempting to carry out death threats” he had made on his military chain of command. He surrendered to El Paso police without incident after he was spotted at a bus station.
Around the time he was sentenced to military prison, his then-wife, Tessa Kelley, filed for divorce. In court documents filed in New Mexico, she reported she had $25 in savings and was subsisting on a $7.50 per hour job at a Taco Bell and $300 per month in child support she was receiving from the father of her son, the boy that Kelley assaulted.
Less than a year later, the Comal County (Texas) Sheriff’s Office said it received a complaint that named Kelley as a suspect in a sexual assault there. He was never charged in that case, and the county’s current sheriff, Mark Reynolds, said Tuesday that his office is re-examining that incident.
Former girlfriends of Kelley told NBC News that Kelley stalked and harassed them long after they stopped dating.
And residents of a mobile home park in Colorado Springs, Colo., where Kelley lived for several months in 2014 after being released from the brig, said they found him unnerving after an incident in which he allegedly beat his dog with a closed fist.
Brent Moody, one of the witnesses who reported the alleged animal cruelty to the sheriff’s department, said Kelley had a large knife on him when he approached him after he witnessed him tackle and beat the dog. He decided to back off and wait for the officers to arrive, Moody said.
“I thought about how close we were to that guy,” Moody told USA TODAY. “Looking at what happened now, it’s hard not to think about what could have happened to us then. What if it escalated more out of control and the cops didn’t come?”
When El Paso County sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene, he initially refused to even come out of his camper – a standoff that lasted a couple of hours. A sheriff’s deputy initially planned to arrest Kelley and even placed him in his squad car and impounded the dog.
But after consulting with two other deputies on the scene, he decided to release Kelley on the scene with a misdemeanor summons for animal cruelty, according to an incident report.
“I cannot speak to why the officer decided to issue a citation rather than to book him into jail,” sheriff’s department spokeswoman Jacqueline Kirby said in an e-mail.
Air Force officials have acknowledged that they failed to flag Kelley as banned from buying the weapons he used in the attack on the South Texas church on Sunday. The Pentagon said it has requested the Defense Department’s inspector general review as to why Kelley’s domestic violence offense was not entered into the National Criminal Information Center database by Air Force officials at Holloman, where he had served.
Kelley only served one year in military prison for the domestic abuse charge, even though he reached a plea agreement that called for him to serve a three-year term.
Geoffrey Corn, a military law expert and professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, said Kelley’s jury – made up of other service members – would potentially consider his prior service and deployments, the fact that he entered a plea agreement and other mitigating factors.
In the military system, a judge directs the juror panel about the range of punishment the guilty party can receive and does not inform the jurors of the plea agreement, Corn noted.
During deliberations, each member of the jury proposes a sentence and then a senior member of the panel arranges the proposals from the lowest to most severe punishment, Corn said. The panel votes and passes down the lowest acceptable punishment on which they reach consensus.
“Why would he get just one year instead of three?” Corn said. “That’s the million-dollar question.”
Post, the Northwestern violence researcher, said one problem is that all of Kelley’s brushes with civilian and military law enforcement over the years appear to have been examined by law enforcement as several one-off events rather than a pattern of behavior.
“It’s critical to examine patterns of behavior even if you don’t make criminal charges or it leads to convictions,” Post said. “Otherwise, you are leaving a very dangerous person in society and the criminal justice system has no clue and other law enforcement agencies have no idea how dangerous (someone like Kelley) is when they have contact with him.
“It’s not the fault of any one policing agency or the military that he was missed,” Post added. “It’s the fault of our system.” – USA Today/TNS