NEW BRAUNFELS, Tex. — The gunman who opened fire in a church outside San Antonio, killing at least 26 people, escaped from a mental health facility in 2012 after he was caught sneaking guns onto an Air Force base and “attempting to carry out death threats” made against military superiors, according to a police report.
The report said officers with the El Paso, police were dispatched to a bus terminal after Devin P. Kelley‘s escape from a behavioral facility about seven miles away in New Mexico. Officers wrote they were told Kelley, who intended to take a bus out of the state, “was a danger to himself and others” at the time and noted that he “was also facing military criminal charges.”
This incident occurred the same year that Kelley was court-martialed. He was charged with abusing his wife and her son between April 2011 and April 2012 and then sentenced in November 2012, according to Air Force documents.
The El Paso police report was first obtained Tuesday by KPRC, a Houston television station.
[ Inside the Texas church, she thought it was her turn to die. Then outside, a man appeared. ]
This revelation came as authorities continued to seek a more complete portrait of Kelley and probed a breakdown in military protocols that failed to flag his domestic violence conviction, which should have prevented him from buying guns.
As tiny Sutherland Springs mourns the church attack, more chilling details have emerged of how Kelley, clad entirely in black and wearing a mask with a skull on it, methodically tried to kill as many victims as possible while he stalked the pews of First Baptist Church.
Officials say Kelley was inside the church for a lengthy period of time, moving around freely as he gunned down people gathered for Sunday morning services. One woman who was wounded during the carnage described Kelley firing at churchgoers who tried to leave, shooting round after round at those cowering or wounded on the church’s floor.
David Brown, whose mother, Farida, was shot in her legs, said she described Kelley firing four shots into the torso of a woman on her left.
“With every shot, she was crying,” Brown said of the woman. “She was just staring at my mom while she tried to comfort her.” As he fired rounds into the woman, Farida Brown held her hand, telling her she was heading to heaven.
When the massacre was over, more than two dozen people were fatally wounded and 20 others were injured, half of them critically. Officials said the 26 people killed included the unborn child of one of the victims at the church.
Authorities said they were still reconstructing what happened inside the church, and are unable to say how long the gunman fired or how many shots were fired. But they said he had ample time to fire at churchgoers.
“I can tell you when the first call came in, the Wilson County Sheriff’s Office arrived within four minutes,” Freeman Martin, a regional director with the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a briefing Tuesday. “I can tell you four minutes is a long time during an active shooter situation.”
When the gunfire ended, nearly everyone inside had been injured or killed, Martin said.
Kelley was shot twice by a local man who heard what was happening and responded to the church with his own rifle. The gunman fled and ultimately shot himself in the head, officials said.
What triggered the latest rampage to cut down Americans in a public space remains unclear. Texas officials have only said that unlike some other massacres at houses of worship, neither religious nor racial animus was the motivation.
[ The lives lost in the Sutherland Springs church shooting ]
Instead, they pointed to the gunman’s rage at his own relatives, saying that he had sent threatening messages to his mother-in-law; she attended the church but was not there Sunday.
“We know there was conflict,” Martin said. “He was upset with the mother in law.”
Officials have not elaborated on the conflict, only saying that Kelley was angry due to “a domestic situation.” Further details on the dispute may be found on Kelley’s phone, Martin said.
However, the FBI said Tuesday that while they have obtained the gunman’s cellphone, investigators have been unable to access it so far. The phone was flown Monday night to the bureau’s facility in Quantico, Va., said Christopher H. Combs, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Antonio division.
Federal authorities have been critical of the encryption they say has kept them off devices crucial to investigations. In the most high-profile case, the FBI and Apple engaged in a lengthy public dispute over an iPhone used by one of the attackers in San Bernardino, Calif. The bureau eventually said an outside group helped them unlock that device without the tech giant’s help. In Texas, the FBI pledged that it would eventually unlock Kelley’s phone as well.
“We will get into that phone,” Combs said at the briefing Tuesday.
The shooting in a place where gun culture is deeply rooted has prompted sharply different responses. Some residents of Sutherland Springs — a small community southeast of San Antonio — said after the attack that it could have been stopped if people inside the church had weapons.
In Washington, Democratic lawmakers sought to force a vote on a bill establishing a select committee on preventing gun violence. Speaking in Seoul, meanwhile, President Trump asserted that tougher gun laws would not have stopped the mass shooting saying that “hundreds more” might have died had another man not been able to “neutralize” the attacker with a gun of his own.
Trump has responded to previous attacks by calling for increased immigration restrictions such as “extreme vetting,” even in cases where his policies would not have stopped those attacks. When asked in Seoul whether he would support “extreme vetting” on guns, Trump said, “There would have been no difference three days ago.”
[ After massacre, some residents call for more guns and not more gun control ]
But how Kelley obtained his weapons has become the source of a separate federal investigation.
Kelley was convicted of domestic violence while serving in the Air Force, making him the latest mass killer with such abuse in his past. On Monday, the Air Force said it failed to follow policies for alerting federal law enforcement about this conviction, which meant he was prohibited “from buying or possessing firearms,” according to Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek.
While serving at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Kelley was convicted of abusing his wife and her child. He spent a year at a Navy brig in San Diego and was then kicked out of the military in 2014 with a bad conduct discharge.
Court-martial documents made public Monday evening state that Kelley kicked, choked and struck his wife in 2011 and 2012. He also struck her young child “on the head and body with a force likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm,” according to the documents.
This information was not in the National Criminal Information Center database, which meant that despite a law meant to keep Kelley from obtaining firearms, his gun purchases were apparently able to proceed.
He had purchased four guns since 2014, one in each year, according to federal officials. Two of those guns were purchased from a retailer, Academy Sports, after he passed federal background checks in 2016 and 2017. Kelley also passed a background check needed for a job as a security guard at a water park over the summer.
The Air Force has launched a review of his case to determine how it handled his criminal records and whether “records in other cases have been reported correctly,” Stefanek said.
Police and court records across three states paint the picture of a young man with a sometimes violent private life.
Dave Ivey, who identified himself as Kelley’s uncle, apologized to the shooting victims in an interview with NBC News.
“I never in a million years could have believed Devin could be capable of this kind of thing,” Ivey said. “My family will suffer because of his coward actions.”
In Sutherland Springs, which is swarmed with TV satellite trucks and reporters from around the world, people are still grappling with the scale of the attack, which tore a hole through the community. It’s a small town, so everyone knew of the victims, even if they didn’t know them personally.
Lorenzo Flores and Terri Smith had just pulled up to pump number 3 at the Valero gas station when they saw a man in black carrying a rifle outside the church. Then they heard the gunfire.
A young man covered in blood escaped the church, sprinted across a field of grass and collapsed inside the convenience store between two aisles, gasping about a shooter killing everyone in the church.
“I might not have known everybody in there by name but I knew their face and I knew their smile,” said Flores, 56, the head cook at Theresa’s Kitchen, an eatery owned by Smith that is tucked into the corner of a convenience store at the gas station.
With Thanksgiving approaching, local residents are invited to a feast on Nov. 19 at the community center, which was Terri Smith’s idea. The feast will continue as planned, they said.
“We’re still going to put that dinner on and I think that’s going to make us a little stronger,” Flores said. “At least, it helps a little. And a little is better than nothing.”
Further reading:
Sutherland Springs pastor: ‘I don’t understand, but I know my God does’
The violent past of the Sutherland Springs attacker
Berman reported from Washington. Joel Achenbach in Sutherland Springs; Bob Moore in Alamogordo, N.M.; Eli Rosenberg in New Braunfels, Tex.; and Brian Murphy, Samantha Schmidt, Wesley Lowery, Sandhya Somashekhar, Alex Horton, Derek Hawkins, Julie Tate, Scott Wilson and Travis Andrews in Washington contributed to this report, which will be updated throughout the day.
