Grisly scene in Texas
Survivors: Killer stalked his victims aisle by aisle
Survivors of Sunday’s mass shooting at a rural Texas church have recounted horrific details of gunman Devin Kelley’s rampage that left 26 people dead.
Smiles and singing were interrupted by gunshots coming from outside the building, they say. Then the shooting stopped and Kelley entered the church. Survivors recall being hit and playing dead as fellow parishioners were felled.
They say Kelley shot crying children at point-blank range, shot the church’s camera crew and targeted anyone who made noise.
David Brown described his 73-year-old mother’s ordeal: “She stayed on the ground the whole time — never saw him, just saw his boots as he walked around the church,” Brown said.
The gunman who killed 26 people at a rural Texas church targeted churchgoers who made noise and shot crying children at point-blank range, survivors say.
Roseanne Solis told KSAT-TV in San Antonio that Sunday’s service at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs began amid smiles and joyous singing. Then, suddenly, tragedy.
“I hear firecrackers popping. Ta-tata,” Solis said. “Everybody started screaming, yelling. Everyone got down, crawling under wherever they could hide. It was so scary.”
The shooting was coming from outside the church. Solis said she was hit in the shoulder. She and her husband, Joaquin Ramirez, were bloodied and played dead, watching as fellow parishioners were felled in the hail of bullets.
When the shooting stopped, she thought police might have arrived. But it was the gunman, 26-year-old Devin Kelley, entering the church.
“Everyone was saying, ‘Be quiet. It’s him. It’s him.’ Then he yelled out, ‘Everybody die (expletive),’ and he started shooting again,” she said.
Farida Brown, 73, was hiding in the back pew, her son David Brown said.
Ramirez said he made eye contact with the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter, Annabelle, who was crying out for help. He signaled with his finger for her to be quiet, knowing the gunman was shooting whoever made sounds.
Pastor Frank Pomeroy was out of town Sunday. Annabelle was among those killed.
Kelley was found a short time later in the crashed vehicle, dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, authorities said.
Though President Donald Trump and others have called the Texas church shootings gunman “deranged, the truth is more nuanced, mental health professionals say
Even if it is eventually determined that one of them had been diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder or some other psychiatric illness, experts say that alone isn’t a risk factor for violence.
“Most people with mental illness are not violent” and only 3 to 5 percent of violent acts “can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service website says.
Jeffrey Swanson, a Duke University psychiatry professor, found that about 1.5 percent of Americans with impulsive anger that doesn’t necessarily amount to mental illness “are carrying around guns with them.” With expansion of concealed carry laws, those numbers or probably higher today, Swanson said.
“That’s a bigger problem than besmirching 10 million people with serious mental illness in this country,” Swanson said.