Survivors of Sunday’s Texas church shooting are sharing their accounts of the horrifying moment the gunman entered First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs and killed 26 people, injuring 20 others.
Rosa Solis was shot in the arm during Texas’ deadliest mass shooting and says she survived by “playing dead” beneath a church pew.
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Speaking to ABC News from her home after being discharged from the hospital on Monday, Solis says shooter Devin Patrick Kelley yelled “Everybody dies,” as he walked up and down the center aisle.
She said the only other sound was “people screaming and people crying” while children yelled for their mothers.
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“I saw bodies with a lot of blood. That’s all I saw because I wasn’t about to get out from where I was hiding,” Solis said. “I played dead. I made sure I hid myself good under that bench.”
Solis’ husband, Joaquin Ramirez told KSAT in Spanish that Kelley targeted crying babies.
David Brown, whose mother Farida was shot in the attack and continues to recover in the hospital, told Good Morning America that Kelley aimed at people trying to escape and even continued shooting at them after they laid on the floor.
“The shooter was shooting everybody. I guess he could see everybody trying to run,” Brown said, recalling what his mother told him. “And then after no one was moving they were just laying on the floor, he walked up and down all the aisles shooting everyone as they laid on the floor.”
Brown said his mother said the shooter walked up and down the aisle “10 to fifteen times.”
Among the 26 dead, about half of the victims were children, according to the Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt, who said there were “12 to 14” deceased children.
Eight members of a single family were also among the dead. The church’s pastor’s 14-year-old daughter also died in the mass shooting.
Authorities say Kelley’s attack was not religiously or racially motivated, but said that there was a “domestic situation” within his family.
Police say that Kelley’s mother-in-law attended the church and that Kelley had “expressed anger towards” her and sent “threatening texts.” However, they do not believe this was a case in which he went to the church looking for his relatives and ending up shooting many others.
“He was there to kill everybody. He is a mass killer of children and people … he is a horrible monster,” a source familiar with the matter told ABC News.
