Air Force error allowed gunman to buy arms
Texas shooter cracked stepson’s skull in 2012
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS: A day after a gunman massacred parishioners in a small Texas church, the Air Force admitted on Monday it had failed to enter the man’s domestic violence court-martial into a federal database that could have blocked him from buying the rifle he used to kill 26 people.
Under federal law, the conviction of the gunman, Devin P Kelley, for domestic assault on his wife and toddler stepson — he had cracked the child’s skull — should have stopped Kelley from legally purchasing the military-style rifle and three other guns he acquired in the past four years.
“The Air Force has launched a review of how the service handled the criminal records of former Airman Devin P Kelley following his 2012 domestic violence conviction,” the Air
Force said in a statement.
The statement said Heather Wilson, Air Force secretary, and Gen David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, had ordered the Air Force inspector general to “conduct a complete review of the Kelley case”.
The Air Force also said it was looking into whether other convictions had been improperly left unreported to the federal database for firearms background checks.
New details of the killings also emerged on Monday, including a possible motive. Law enforcement officials said Kelley may have been driven by anger toward his estranged wife’s family, the final chapter in a life full of domestic rage. In addition to his court-martial, in which his previous wife was the victim, he had been investigated on a rape complaint, though he was not charged and his relationship to the woman in the complaint was unclear.
The mother of Kelley’s most recent wife, Danielle, was a member of the First Baptist Church here, the target of Kelley’s rage on Sunday.
“The suspect’s mother-in-law attended this church,” Freeman Martin, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference on Monday. “We know that he had made threatening texts,” he added, declining to elaborate.
“This was not racially motivated. It wasn’t over religious beliefs. It was a domestic situation going on,” Mr Martin added. Kelley’s wife and her parents were not at the church on Sunday, authorities said. They could not be reached for interviews on Monday.
Among the victims of the massacre, the worst mass shooting in Texas history, were eight members of one family and at least a dozen children, one as young as 18 months old, officials said. One of the victims was pregnant, and officials included the child she was carrying in the death toll of 26.
Officers described finding a scene of unfathomable carnage, where mothers were found sprawled atop children they had tried to shield. Sheriff Joe Tackitt Jr of Wilson County said deputies found “blood everywhere” inside the church. “Wherever you walked in the church, there was death,” he said.
Kelley, who was dressed in black and wore a skull-face mask, emerged from the church after he was done shooting, then was himself shot by a bystander outside, who hit Kelley in the leg and the torso. Kelley made it back to his car and led the bystander and another man in a dramatic chase that ended in a crash, with Kelley dead behind the wheel. He had shot himself in the head, officials said.
The shootings came about a month after 58 people were killed at a concert in Las Vegas, and were the latest in a string of mass killings in the United States. They led to another round of calls for more gun restrictions, though they were muted in comparison with previous tragedies, perhaps because gun-control advocates realized that a Republican-controlled Washington would not give in on gun rights.
Asked about the shooting during his trip to Asia, President Donald Trump said on Monday that the shooting was not related to regulations on gun ownership.
“I think that mental health is your problem here,” Mr Trump said at a joint news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. “This was a very, based on preliminary reports, very deranged individual.”
Reiterating his oft-repeated argument that more guns, not less, could be the answer, he added, “Fortunately, somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it would have been, as bad it was, it would have been much worse”.