San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
The gunman’s wife
TIED TO HER BED, DANIELLE KELLEY COULD DO NOTHING TO STOP HER HUSBAND, DEVIN KELLEY, FROM COMMITTING THE SUTHERLAND SPRINGS CHURCH MASSACRE. UNITED AS OUTCASTS, THEIR MARRIAGE WAS FULL OF TURMOIL — AND TENDERNESS.
On the morning of Sunday, Nov. 5, Devin Kelley asked his wife, Danielle, to make him a light breakfast, an unusual request, considering he normally ate a heaping plate of tacos.
Danielle did as he asked. He threw it up minutes later.
She asked if he was
OK.
“We only have an hour left,” he said.
She assumed he meant he had to go to work.
“He was really different, and off,” she said. “Now, going back and looking at it, the things he said then — it was all messed up.”
After breakfast, they sat quietly on the couch while “Alaska State Troopers” played on TV. Danielle watched her husband closely. He seemed disengaged.
Devin stood up. He put Michael, their 2-year-old, in their bedroom. Raeleigh, their 5-month-old daughter, was already in her crib.
Then Devin forced his wife, screaming and crying in protest, into the bedroom.
Michael watched his father bind his mother to the bed with rope, handcuffs and duct tape.
The bedroom filled with the sound of Michael’s wails.
Devin told Danielle he loved her. He kissed Raeleigh. And he said to Michael: “I’ll be right back.”
Strapped to the bed, Danielle watched Devin
“Devin was sick. He lost who he was. … He would never have hurt anybody.”
Danielle Kelley
grab his Ruger AR-556 and two handguns. She saw him put on his military-style tactical gear and a bulletproof vest.
“You get a sense of what’s going to happen,” Danielle said. “Because no one just leaves in all-black attire with a ballistic vest.”
In a series of interviews with the San Antonio Express-News, Danielle Kelley, 23, described — for the first time publicly — her life with Devin and the events leading to the Sutherland Springs church massacre.
She recounted a relationship that began in innocence and slowly deteriorated as Devin sank deeper and deeper into delirium.
Even now, Danielle clings to better memories of Devin, the boy she had fallen in love with when she was a teenager and later married.
On her key ring, she keeps a pocketknife engraved with his name. On her phone, she still has photos of him and the children. When Michael sees them, he thumps his hand to his chest.
“My daddy, my daddy,” he says.
Danielle still retains Devin’s last name. She said she’s “not going to be ashamed” of it.
Nine months after the massacre, Danielle struggles to reconcile her grief at losing Devin with her piercing guilt over the devastation he caused. She wavers between defending him and acknowledging that there were “red flags” for years.
In 2012, Devin was courtmartialed for fracturing his stepson’s skull and assaulting his then-wife, a conviction that led to his bad-conduct discharge from the Air Force. Danielle maintains that he didn’t do it, that Devin’s first wife, the baby’s mother, injured the child.
Two years later, he was charged with cruelty to animals for striking their dog. Danielle watched it happen and described it as an “open-handed spanking.”
Michelle Shields, Danielle’s mother, said in an interview earlier this year that Devin was a controlling, abusive husband and that Danielle was a wife who often accepted it.
Danielle admits that their relationship wasn’t healthy, but she didn’t want to go into detail. She said the marriage “had its ups and downs like any other relationship.”
“We all have our demons,” Danielle said.
She smiles at the memory of him.
Michelle said she thinks her daughter is still under Devin’s spell.
She hopes his hold on her will weaken with the passage of time. Danielle seemed more open in recent days to admitting her husband’s controlling nature, Michelle said. But after years of watching her daughter plead for help, only to defend Devin when she tried to intervene, Michelle said she can’t be sure that Danielle’s apparent change of heart is genuine.
“I don’t know if she’s finally coming around to it, admitting to it or if she’s just saying it because she thinks that’s what I want to hear her say,” Michelle said.
Sometimes, she wonders if Danielle even realizes what Devin did to her.
“No matter what, I will love him,” Danielle said. “Even though he went off and ruined more people’s lives than I could ever imagine.”
Danielle met Devin when they were hanging out with friends. She was a distraught teen with a thick stripe of bleached blond hair and marks on her wrists and legs from cutting herself.
“I was the weird, awkward kid that had a lot of issues,” she said.
She was 13. He was 17. They shared the same birthday.
“I was like ‘Oh man, this guy’s cute. I’m a dweeb.’ We just talked and hung out, and then we got really close. And then it came to where Devin knew everything about me,” she said.
They were close friends for years before they dated. Neither had a stable path through adolescence.
Michelle adopted Danielle through Child Protective Services when she was 4 years old. Her biological mother and father had hit her, thrown her and scalded her with boiling water.
Michelle had lost three children through complications of pregnancy and had one adoption fall through. After that, she specifically looked to adopt a child she could rescue.
“I wanted someone who needed me as much as I needed them,” she said.
Her home in Sutherland Springs proved not to be the safe place she intended for her daughter. Danielle said she was sexually abused by a male relative, but she declined to give details, citing an ongoing court case.
“I built up a lot of stuff, and I had a lot of issues from it. To the point where I don’t really like men,” Danielle said.
She said it’s the reason she overdosed on pills her senior year in a suicide attempt.
“I just didn’t want to deal with life. Tired of everything. Tired of the feelings,” she said.
Danielle told only one other person about the sexual abuse: her best friend, Devin Kelley.
Similarly, Devin confided in her about having been bullied as a child. While other friends shared their dreams with one another, Devin and Danielle shared their hardships. When the world was unfair, they as- sured each other that it wasn’t their fault.
They connected over their inability to connect with the rest of the world.
“We had no secrets,” Danielle said. “He only ever kept one from me.”
Devin was home-schooled before attending New Braunfels High School, from which he graduated in 2009.
He was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, school records show. Classmates said he groped or harassed them, describing him as “creepy.”
“People thought he was really weird, and this awful person, but I could never see that in him,” Danielle said.
When Devin enlisted in the military in 2010, he and Danielle kept in touch through letters. She said he confided in her about the problems in his marriage to Tessa Brennaman, his first wife.
After Devin was court-martialed by the Air Force for cracking his stepson’s skull, he admitted to the assault in a self-recorded video.
“We all suffer the consequences for the mistakes we make, and I happened to make one,” he said in the recording. “This is not the first mistake, and this is not the last mistake of probably many to come.”
He developed a fatalistic attitude. He philosophized about angels and demons, right and wrong, and he questioned how much control people have in their lives.
While in the military, Devin was caught sneaking weapons onto a base in New Mexico. He made death threats against his commanding officers and was sent to a mental health facility.
He and Danielle briefly lived in Colorado. They later moved to his parents’ 28-acre property in New Braunfels, where he practiced target shooting and regularly went hunting.
“I don’t think people change,” he said in the recording. “I believe in miracles. I believe in angels. I believe in demons. And I think for most people, they’re going to be who they are and live their lives out based on the choices they make.”
Danielle would comment on how Devin’s new beard made him look old. He’d wink at her flirtatiously. They both remarked on how he was always the one to speak his mind, while she tended to avoid confrontation. Danielle said they complemented each other that way.
But after the Air Force, he was different, Danielle said. She blamed it on his time in confinement, which he had described to her as a “living hell.”
He got upset easily, she said. He would yell and swear, and she’d block him on her phone. But he always apologized, and she’d eventually relent.
“We are all made up of bad,” Danielle said.
They married April 4, 2014, when she was 19 and he was 23.
Throughout their marriage, Danielle never went anywhere alone, she said. He was with her for every errand and outing, and he even drove her to and from her job as a cashier at H-E-B.
“It was frustrating,” Danielle said. “But you would be surprised, when everything’s gone, how much I miss it.”
Sometimes Danielle would tell Michelle about the mental and physical abuse he inflicted, Michelle said. But then the next minute, she’d pretend it never happened.
“I think she was afraid of him. That if he found out — he’d always say he’s sorry the next minute, you know, so she was like ‘Oh, OK, if he found out I said something he’s going to get more upset, so we’re just going to keep it calm because he apologized,” Michelle said.
The couple slowly cut their ties to the Sutherland Springs community, where her mother was a devoted member of First Baptist Church. Danielle saw her mother less and less.
When their second child was born last year, Devin sent a series of threatening texts to his mother-in-law, telling her that if she entered the hospital room, “I will personally make it my mission to destroy your entire life. I suggest you don’t test my resolve.”
When Michelle would argue with Devin, he would tell her that Danielle could make her own decisions. The more she tried to save her, Michelle said, the further Danielle withdrew.
“I did pick him over her,” Danielle said. “Because Devin was everything in my life.”
Devin’s descent into madness accelerated in the six months before the massacre.
He grew more depressed. His short temper got shorter. Every disagreement, every annoyance, became a fight.
“He was slowly becoming not the person that he was,” Danielle said. “He was shutting down.”
In April 2016, he bought an assault-style rifle from an Academy Sports and Outdoors store in San Antonio. He also accumulated more than a dozen magazines, each with a capacity of 30 bullets.
The Air Force had failed to report Devin’s domestic violence conviction to federal law enforcement, which could have prevented him from buying the gun.
He was abusing his anxiety medication, Danielle said. He never wanted to leave the apartment. She had to beg him to let them go outside so Michael could be around nature or other kids his age.
They became reclusive. They had no friends.
“Sometimes people can get out of that depression, and other times it takes the best of them. And it took the best of him,” Danielle said.
When she could convince him to go to area churches, including First Baptist in Sutherland Springs, he laughed during the sermons. Devin became an atheist.
He told Danielle that a God
wouldn’t let people like him and her go through such hardships. He resented God, and the world, for not protecting them from the world’s cruelties.
“Devin was sick. He lost who he was. Because the real Devin would’ve never hurt babies. He was a family person. He would never have hurt anybody,” Danielle said. “He lost the touch of reality.”
Less than an hour after leaving their house Nov. 5, Devin went into a crouch outside the Sutherland Springs church and began firing. At first, the worshippers inside thought they were hearing fireworks.
The congregants were singing “Are You Washed in
Blood?” when he entered.
“Everybody die!” he shrieked, firing rapidly.
He seemed to be aiming for a corner of the church where Michelle typically sat, though she wasn’t at church that day.
The congregants screamed in terror. A couple managed to race out of exits. Most hid under the pews.
They watched his black boots move up and down the sanctuary as bodies fell.
Parents and grandparents shielded their children. Blood pooled on the floors. Smoke filled the air.
In seven minutes, he killed 26 people and wounded 20 others.
Growing up, Danielle babysat Megan, Emily and Greg Hill. She admired Karla and Bryan Holcombe’s loving relationship. She was cared for by her grandmother, Lou White. Devin killed them all.
“If I could take everything, all the pain, and hold it on my own I would, so nobody else would hurt. If it was only me that could’ve died and everybody else could’ve been alive, I would’ve gladly taken that,” Danielle said.
“A lot of people who died were very special to me.”
The Holcombe family lost nine of their own, spanning three generations, including an 18-month-old girl. Couples such as Therese and Richard Rodriguez died together. Children lost their mothers. Parents lost their babies.
Out of respect for their grief, Danielle didn’t attend their funerals.
Those who survived the shooting are still grappling with the aftermath. David Colbath is in physical therapy for his eight bullet wounds. Kris Workman will likely never walk again. Some congregants shake uncontrollably at loud sounds. Others can’t bear to enter the old church sanctuary, now a memorial for the dead.
A security team of congregants is equipped with guns and earpieces during services at the new, temporary church. The town’s museum opened a memorial gallery this month with donated items and belongings of people who were killed.
Sutherland Springs is a small, unincorporated town, with two gas stations, a post office and the church at its center. The effects of the shooting there are inescapable.
“I feel awful,” Danielle said, tears in her eyes as she clutched a blanket. “Because nothing I can ever say will ever, ever, ever mend anyone’s heart.”
“I just shot up the Sutherland Springs church,” a frantic Devin said on the phone.
He was on speakerphone with Danielle and his parents. He had called them on his way to the church and asked them to go to his house. His wife needed help, he said.
His parents rushed to the house and untied her from the bed. And then they got his next call.
They pleaded with him to stop, not realizing it was already too late.
“He was like ‘I can’t, I’ve killed so many people. So, so many people,’ ” Danielle recalled. “He kept saying how sorry he was.”
The killing spree had ended outside the church, in a shootout with Stephen Willeford, a neighbor who had heard the gunfire and ran out barefoot with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
Kathleen and Fred Curnow watched Devin leave the church from the window of their house. Kathleen said Devin was “methodical” and “like a robot” and that he seemed “possessed.”
“The devil had a hold of him,” Fred said.
And then Willeford shot him.
“It was like he snapped out of it,” Kathleen said.
Devin scrambled into his gray SUV. A car chase ensued. Devin’s Ford Expedition veered off into a ditch. Then he called Danielle and his parents.
The three huddled around the phone. Numb.
“There’s no reaction,” Danielle said. “Because how can you process something like that?”
He told them he wasn’t going to make it home. He told them he loved them. And they said the same.
Then the call ended.
Devin Kelley raised a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Texas Rangers soon arrived at Danielle’s house. She asked if her husband had survived.
She cried for the loss of her husband and her children’s father. She would cry again when she discovered who was among the dead.
Devin was not the man she thought he was.
“How could you leave me with two kids to raise?” she would ask. “And how could you destroy so many other people because you couldn’t face things in life?” wide-set brown eyes and a dimpled chin like her father. She curls her lips when she finds something interesting, like Devin would, Danielle said. In the weeks after the shooting, Danielle said she couldn’t bear to look at her. And Michael will have a fit if someone says they’ll be right back, because those were his father’s last words.
“I want them to remember this as the time when their mommy stood up, and took care of them, and loved them and made up for two parents,” Danielle said. “And made that transition to where it was not as painful for them.”
Suicide was not far from Danielle’s mind the first few months after the massacre.
“There were times when I didn’t want to have to be here. I didn’t want to be a single mom. I didn’t want to have the label of my spouse being a mass murderer,” she said. “It was a lot to bear, and I didn’t want to have to do it.”
She also began to doubt her belief in God.
“I was just like ‘You let us fall.’ And I felt alone. And then there’s times where I don’t even — I just, can’t. People talk about God and I just can’t stand it,” she said.
But she has come to feel that she can’t continue on the long road to recovery without the thought of God holding her hand.
Danielle has started going back to church in Sutherland Springs.
“It’s difficult because it’s not the same,” she said. “I’m used to seeing Karla smiling, getting all excited. Or Lou, my grandmother, smiling and holding the babies, saying ‘Oh come on, sit over here, I saved you a spot.’ ”
Willeford said if coming to church brings her peace, she should continue to come. Michelle Shields said the congregation has welcomed her with open arms.
Danielle said she’s not sure why Devin chose her church. It could have been because of her mother, as others have speculated, but she’s not sure.
“Nobody truly knows somebody,” she said. “You can live with that person and love that person for years, and you still cannot truly know that person because you can”t know their inner thoughts and feelings.”
She hopes that others who need help will hear her story and not be afraid to seek counseling.
“I wish people had more compassion and for people to take things seriously when somebody says they don’t want to live anymore. Or little factors that say ‘You’re not the same person,’ ” she said. “Because it’s OK to get help, it won’t mean that you’re different. It just means that you need a little extra love in life.”
Danielle has plans to get a tattoo. It will read, “I will carry you with me, ’til I see you again.”
She said it’s about the 26 people who were killed.
She said it’s also about Devin Kelley.