Inside the Texas church, she thought it was her turn

Woman, 73, was shot 4 times, then heard another gun.

As Farida Brown lay on the floor in the last row of pews in Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church, the 73-yearold woman felt certain she would be the next one killed. And she almost was. The gunman had fired numerous rounds into her legs. She was shot four times, but they all struck soft tissue. None of her bones were broken, and no arteries were hit, her son said. But the man was revisiting those he had shot to make sure they were dead and if they weren’t, he was shooting them once more.

Brown’s recollections of the horror that she and others in the church experienced, as told to her son, are among the first offered by one of the 20 wounded Sunday in the rampage that killed 26 churchgoers. The son, David Brown, told her story to reporters Monday, including CNN and The Washington Post.

The first inkling that there was something wrong, David Brown told The Washington Post, was when she heard shots being fired through the windows from outside.

Then, when the gunman entered, Farida Brown had heard the relentless poppop-popping as he opened fire on worshipers. She had watched him shoot anyone who attempted to flee.

The Sunday school teacher to her right told her to get down on the floor. He then fled.

She told her son that the shooter paced back and forth, firing into the pews and shooting at cellphones anytime someone tried to call police. He shot at her phone at least three times.

As the gunman fired shots into the congregation, “everyone was running around trying to escape,” said David Brown, but most lay on the floor, hiding.

The gunman fired four shots into the torso of the woman on Farida Brown’s left, David Brown said.

“With every shot, she was crying,” Brown said of the woman. “She was just staring at my mom while she tried to comfort her.” As he fired rounds into the woman, Brown held her hand, telling her she was heading to heaven.

Up until that point, Farida Brown had only sustained shots to her legs. But as the shooter fired into the woman next to her, Farida Brown prepared to be slain.

“Then she thought that it was her turn,” David Brown told The Washington Post. “She just started praying.”

At that moment, she heard a shot fired from a different man, at the front door.

The gunman has since been identified as Devin Patrick Kelley.

The other man, the one who confronted him, was Stephen Willeford, who lives near the church. Willeford, a certified shooting instructor, grabbed his own rifle and raced out of his house barefoot.

“I kept hearing the shots, one after another,” Willeford told 40/29 News, “very rapid shots, just ‘pop pop pop pop.’ and I knew every one of those shots represented someone, that it was aimed at someone, that they weren’t just random shots.

“He saw me and I saw him,” Willeford told the station.

It was Willeford’s presence that distracted Kelley.

Willeford hit Kelley at least once, authorities said. Kelley then dropped his rifle, jumped in his Ford Expedition SUV, and fled. Willeford, with the help of Johnnie Langendorff who had stopped in his truck when he saw what was happening, gave chase at high speed, until Kelley’s car careened off the road into a ditch. Kelley was dead, with three gunshot wounds, including a self-inflicted shot to the head, authorities said. Monday. Willeford apparently hit him in the leg and torso, according to Freeman Martin of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Farida Brown survived. She sustained bullet wounds and bullet fragments and shrapnel in her legs, groin and left hip.

David Brown first heard about the attack through a text message from his sister. “There’s been a shooting at Mom’s church,” the message read, he said. “She’s been shot.”

“What kind of a sick joke is this?” he said he thought.

He immediately packed a bag and drove from Houston to the hospital in Floresville, Texas, where his mother was undergoing surgery. Farida Brown emerged from surgery about 45 minutes after he arrived.

The next day, when she had begun to recover from surgery, she described the scene in further detail to Texas Rangers authorities and to hospital staff, with her son in the room, he said. She did not feel comfortable speaking to news outlets on Monday, and asked her son to recount her experiences.

Two other survivors, Joaquin Ramirez and Joanne Solis, told KSAT that when the babies in the church cried, the gunman would shoot them point blank.

Solis was shot in the arm, near the front door, while Ramirez was struck by shrapnel.