Warning signs about gunman somehow went unheeded
People told authorities he was a dangerous man
“Everything we know about domestic violence predicted this could happen. This is not mental illness.”
Lori Post
Northwestern University
There was no shortage of red flags warning of the volatility of the gunman who attacked a Texas church.
In the years leading up to Sunday’s horrific assault that left 26 dead and
20 wounded, Devin Kelley cracked his
1-year-old stepson’s skull, menaced his former wife, was accused of sexual assault, had a history of stalking former girlfriends and escaped from a mental health facility.
Long before he walked into the Sutherland Springs’ First Baptist Church, victims of Kelley’s rage — and those who simply crossed his path — repeatedly told authorities he was a dangerous man.
“Everything we know about domestic violence predicted this could happen,”
said Lori Post, a researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who studies domestic violence. “This is not mental illness. He has a personality disorder, and that disorder is consistent with psychopathy, given prior charges of domestic violence, animal abuse and sexual predatory behavior.”
Tuesday, law enforcement officials continued to investigate what led to Kelley’s attack at the church — he even reportedly shot at crying children in the pews — as more reports of the gunman’s violent and disconcerting behavior surfaced. He was entangled in a family dispute before the shooting and sent threatening text messages to his mother-in-law, who was a member of the church whose congregants he assaulted.
Interviews and publicly available documents reveal his penchant for violence had boiled for years.
Kelley escaped from a mental health facility in New Mexico in June 2012 before being caught in El Paso, according to a police department report obtained by USA TODAY.
That incident occurred after Kelley, a former member of the U.S. Air Force, was charged by military authorities with beating his wife and stepson, leaving the boy with a fractured skull, but before he was sentenced to a year in the brig.
Kelley escaped from the Peak Behavioral Health Services Center in Santa Teresa, N.M., fleeing a few miles across the state line to El Paso. In the police report, Kelley was described to authorities by an unnamed witness as “a danger to himself and others as he had already been caught sneaking firearms onto Hollomon Air Force Base.”
The witness told police Kelley “was attempting to carry out death threats” he made on his military chain of command. He surrendered to El Paso police without incident after he was spotted at a bus station.
Around the time he was sentenced to military prison, his then-wife, Tessa Kelley, filed for divorce. In court documents filed in New Mexico, she reported she had $25 in savings and subsisted on a $7.50-per-hour job at a Taco Bell and $300 per month in child support she received from the father of her son, the boy Kelley assaulted.
Less than a year later, the Comal County (Texas) Sheriff ’s Office said it received a complaint that named Kelley as a suspect in a sexual assault. He was never charged in that case, and the county’s sheriff, Mark Reynolds, said Tuesday that his office was re-examining that incident.
Former girlfriends of Kelley told NBC News that he stalked and harassed them long after they stopped dating.
Residents of a mobile home park in Colorado Springs, where Kelley lived for several months in 2014 after being released from the brig, said they found him unnerving after an incident in which he allegedly beat his dog.
Brent Moody, one of the witnesses who reported the alleged animal cruelty to the sheriff ’s department, said Kelley had a large knife when he approached Moody after he witnessed Kelley tackle and beat the dog. Moody said he decided to back off and wait for the officers to arrive.
“I thought about how close we were to that guy,” Moody told USA TODAY. “Looking at what happened now, it’s hard not to think about what could have happened to us then. What if it escalated more out of control and the cops didn’t come?”
When El Paso County sheriff ’s deputies arrived at the scene, he initially refused to even come out of his camper — a standoff that lasted a couple of hours. A sheriff ’s deputy initially planned to arrest Kelley and even placed him in his squad car and impounded the dog.
After consulting with two other deputies on the scene, he decided to release Kelley on the scene with a misdemeanor summons for animal cruelty, according to an incident report.
“I cannot speak to why the officer decided to issue a citation rather than to book him into jail,” sheriff ’s department spokeswoman Jacqueline Kirby said in an e-mail.
Air Force officials acknowledged that they failed to flag Kelley as banned from buying the weapons he used in the attack Sunday. The Pentagon said it requested the Defense Department’s inspector general to review why Kelley’s domestic violence offense was not entered into the National Criminal Information Center database by Air Force officials at Holloman, where he had served. Kelley served one year in military prison for the domestic abuse charge, even though he reached a plea agreement that called for him to serve a three-year term.
Geoffrey Corn, a military law expert and professor at South Texas College of Law-Houston, said Kelley’s jury — made up of other service members — would potentially consider his prior service and deployments, the fact that he entered a plea agreement and other mitigating factors.
“Why would he get just one year instead of three?” Corn said. “That’s the million-dollar question.”
Post, the Northwestern violence researcher, said one problem is that all of Kelley’s brushes with civilian and military law enforcement over the years appear to have been examined by law enforcement as several one-off events rather than a pattern of behavior.
“It’s critical to examine patterns of behavior even if you don’t make criminal charges or it leads to convictions,” Post said. “Otherwise, you are leaving a very dangerous person in society, and the criminal justice system has no clue, and other law enforcement agencies have no idea how dangerous (someone like Kelley) is when they have contact with him.”