Widow of church shooter haunted

On that November morning, Danielle Kelley screamed as her husband, Devin Kelley, strapped her to their bed in their Texas home. Their 2-year-old son, Michael, sobbed as he watched his father tie up his mother with rope, handcuffs and duct tape. Raeleigh, their 5-month-old daughter, lay in her crib, Danielle Kelley told the San Antonio Express-News.

Wearing a ballistic vest, Devin Kelley left the house with his Ruger AR-556 and two handguns. Less than an hour later, he stormed a small Sutherland Springs church and sprayed bullets into the congregation, killing 26 people and injuring 20.

For the first time since the massacre, the gunman’s wife described that day, and the excruciating months that have followed, in interviews with the Express-News published Saturday.

After a shootout with a local man who ran to the church barefoot to intervene, Devin Kelley sped away from First Baptist in his SUV, which careened off the road into a ditch. He called his parents, who had since rushed to his house to untie Danielle Kelley from the bed. He spoke to the three of them over a speakerphone.

“He was like ‘I’ve killed so many people. So, so many people,’” Danielle Kelley recalled. “He kept saying how sorry he was.”

Then Devin Kelley shot himself in the head. The 26-year-old was dead by the time police arrived.

“It’s just not fair because my kids now have to grow up without a dad,” his widow said in an emotional video interview. “I have to do things by myself being a single parent.

“And a lot of people go through that normally,” she added, “but now it’s like, I’m a single parent to kids, and I have a husband that murdered people.”

Danielle Kelley also grieved the loss of more than two dozen members of a church community she grew up with. The victims were families that Danielle Kelley sat beside at church and whose children she used to babysit. Among the dead was her grandmother, Lou White, who took care of her when she was young.

While it’s still not clear why Devin Kelley targeted First Baptist Church, his widow and some authorities speculate it was connected to his troubled relationship with Danielle Kelley’s mother, Michelle Shields, who attended the church but was not present when he opened fire on the congregation.

Danielle Kelley has since started going back to church in Sutherland Springs, she told the Express-News, but it’s “difficult because it’s not the same.”

“I’m used to seeing ... Lou, my grandmother, smiling and holding the babies, saying ‘Oh come on, sit over here, I saved you a spot,’” she said.

Danielle Kelley described befriending Devin Kelley when she was 13 and he was 17. They connected over their shared struggles growing up. She said she had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, and during her senior year of high school she