Pastor: Texas church will be demolished

Site of mass shooting ‘too stark a reminder’

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas — The Texas church where more than two dozen people were killed by a gunman during Sunday services will be demolished, according to its pastor, who says it would be too painful to continue using First Baptist Church as a place of worship.

Pastor Frank Pomeroy discussed the building with leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention earlier this week. A spokesman for the group said the denomination’s top executives traveled to the rural community in a show of support.

The pastor described the church as “too stark of a reminder” of the massacre, spokesman Sing Oldham said.

No decisions can be made without consulting congregants, but Pomeroy discussed turning the site into a memorial and putting up a new building, 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 as she visited a row of white crosses commemorating the victims. She said her daughter attended worship services and a weekly Thursday night youth group meeting held by another victim, Karla Holcombe.

Jeannie Brown, visiting from Indiana, stopped at the site with her daughter, who used to live in Sutherland Springs but left decades ago for San Antonio. Asked whether the church should be torn down, Brown said: “Yes. Who would want to go back in there? But then if it is destroyed, does that mean he (the gunman) won?”

Other sites of mass shootings have been demolished, including Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults in 2012.

The father of the gunman broke the family’s silence and said his relatives are grieving.

Michael Kelley spoke to ABC News on Wednesday from his home in New Braunfels, about 35 miles north of Sutherland Springs.

He said he does not want the “media circus” surrounding the attack by Devin Patrick Kelley to destroy “our lives, our grandchildren’s lives.”

David J. Phillip The Associated Press Crosses showing victims names outside the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Pastor Frank Pomeroy says the church where a man opened fire Sunday, killing more than two dozen, will be demolished.