Texas church massacre site to be torn down, pastor says
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas — The Texas church where more than two dozen people were killed by a gunman during Sunday services will be demolished, the pastor said.
Pastor Frank Pomeroy told leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention earlier this week that it would be too painful to continue using First Baptist Church as a place of worship.
The pastor described the church as “too stark of a reminder” of the massacre, spokesman Sing Oldham said.
No final decisions can be made without consulting congregants, but Pomeroy discussed turning the site into a memorial for the dead and putting up a new building on property the church owns, Oldham said.
Charlene Uhl, mother of 16-yearold Haley Krueger, who died in the attack, agreed that the church should come down.
There should still be a church “but not here,” she said yesterday as she visited a row of white crosses commemorating the victims in front of the building.
Other sites of mass shootings have been torn down, including Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults in December 2012. A one-room Amish schoolhouse near Lancaster, Penn., was torn down in 2006, 10 days after an assailant shot and killed five girls ages 6 to 13.
Authorities said Devin Patrick Kelley, who shot and killed 25 people and wounded 11 others at the church, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after being shot by two residents as he was leaving.