TODDLER AMONG 26 MURDERED AT CHURCH
Psychopath broke baby’s skull, beat his wife, threatened family, was booted from military — and Air Force blunder let him purchase a deadly arsenal to slaughter dozens
WHEN DEVIN Kelley unleashed 450 bullets inside a packed Texas church, he was carrying out the final, fiendish act of a long downward spiral.
The Sunday massacre at the Sutherland Springs house of worship that left 26 dead and at least 20 wounded started with a threatening text message Kelley sent to his mother-in-law.
Then the 26-year-old showed up at the First Baptist Church armed for battle with a black tactical vest, skull face mask and Ruger AR-556 assault rifle.
The killer turned the sanctuary into a bloodbath, emptying his 15 magazines of ammunition — a total of 450 rounds, authorities said.
But his mother-in-law wasn’t among his victims. She didn’t attend services Sunday morning.
Those who died at Kelley’s hand ranged in age from 18 months to 77 years. About half of the wounded were children.
After shooting up the church, Kelley rushed outside, where he was confronted by a barefoot neighbor toting a rifle. The neighbor, Stephen Willeford, exchanged gunfire with Kelley, striking him in the leg and torso.
The wounded mass shooter drove off with Willeford and a second man in pursuit.
Before crashing his car, Kelley called his dad and told him he had been shot twice and was likely to die. The killer was found in his car dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.
Kelley’s descent from a cheerful churchgoing boy to an angry, armed-to-the-teeth man was motivated by a domestic dispute, authorities said.
“We know there was conflict between the families and whether that was revenge or not would be speculation on my part,” said Freeman Martin of the Texas Public Safety Department.
Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt said the carnage inside First Baptist was horrific.
“You don’t expect to walk into a church and see something like that, especially when all the bodies were there, and seeing the children. That’s what hurts the most,” Tackitt said.
But there were signs of burgeoning evil in Kelley long before Sunday — including a brutal assault on his thenwife and infant stepson, a discharge from the Air Force, an attack on his dog and a turn away from God.
His two charges of domestic assault while serving in the armed forces should have prevented him from buying firearms. But the Air Force on Monday admitted it failed to provide key information to the FBI. Kelley’s name was never added to a national no-sell database that gun sellers would have seen during a routine background check.
Kelley grew up in New Braunfels, a city of roughly 70,000 located 32 miles northeast of San Antonio. Kelley was the middle child of three.
His father, Michael Kelley, was an accountant and programmer who ran a billing software company out of the family’s sprawling home, which featured a pool, outdoor kitchen and barbecue.
The younger Kelley attended youth services at his local church and messaged with his friends on MySpace. He wasn’t the most social youngster, but friends described him as happy and caring and God-fearing.
Kelley was a different person by the time he graduated from New Braunfels High School — a deeply trou-
bled outcast who appeared more unstable with each passing year.
“He was always twisted in high school,” former classmate Kayla Shearer wrote on Facebook. “I always thought if someone in our class would be able to do something like this, it would be him.”
When he was 18, Kelley briefly dated a 13-year-old. When she broke it off, he continued pursuing her.
“He somehow would always find out my number . . . and he would constantly call me," Brittany Adcock, now 22, told NBC News. “I've had to change my number quite a bit.”
Other young women recalled Kelley’s creepy interactions.
“He was very hypersexual and would always tell me in detail what him and his gf were doing,” a fellow student wrote to the Daily News. “I told him we couldn’t be friends anymore.”
Kelley was in the ROTC in high school, but his classmates were surprised to learn that he enlisted in the Air Force soon after their 2009 graduation.
“He never struck me as a guy willing to serve,” fellow student Vincent Paul wrote on Twitter. “He was weird as hell and completely unstable back then.”
Two years into his military service, Kelley married a New Mexico woman, Tessa Loge, while serving as a low-ranking airman in a logistics readiness unit at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
But his military career did not last long — or end well.
In 2012, Kelley pleaded guilty to “assaulting his son on diverse occasions and assaulting his wife on numerous occasions,” said Don Christensen, a retired colonel who was the Air Force’s chief prosecutor at the time.
Kelley beat the boy, born in July 2010, so severely his skull fractured, Christensen said.
Kelley spent 12 months in confinement and was demoted to the lowest possible rank. The Air Force booted him from the service on a bad conduct discharge in 2014. By then, he and his first wife had split.
Kelley remarried in Texas later that year to Danielle Shields. The two relocated to an RV park in Colorado Springs, where he was arrested on charges of animal cruelty in August 2014.
Witnesses told police they saw an angry Kelley chase down his young white-and-brown husky. “The suspect then started beating on the dog with both fists, punching it in the head and chest,” according to the police report.
A witness “could hear the suspect yelling at the dog and while he was striking it, the dog was yelping and whining. The suspect then picked up the dog by the neck into the air and threw it onto the ground.”
After a long standoff with police, Kelley was arrested. The case was later dismissed, and Kelley returned to Texas.
His high school friends noticed that he was filling his Facebook page with posts denouncing those who believed in God.
“He was always talking about how people who believe in God were stupid and trying to preach his atheism,” a friend, Nina Nava, wrote on Facebook.
He and his wife grew estranged and he struggled to hold on to low-end jobs. Kelley lasted not even six weeks as an unarmed night security guard at a water park in New Braunfels.
By 2017, he was back living at his father’s estate, which is hidden through a forest of scrawny juniper cedar and oak trees.
He quietly amassed an arsenal of weapons, including Ruger .22 and Glock 9-mm. handguns, as well as the Ruger AR-556 rifle.
One neighbor said he often heard the sound of “heavy firepower” coming from the Kelley family’s yard. “It happens so much you just ignore it,” the neighbor said.
On Oct. 29, he posted a photo of an assault rifle on his Facebook page. “She’s a bad bitch,” he wrote.
Kelley’s page also featured an ominous quote from Mark Twain.
“I do not fear death,” it read. “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”