The father of the man who gunned down churchgoers during a Texas service has spoken out for the first time since the mass shooting.
“We are grieving, our family is grieving,” Michael Kelley told ABC News on Wednesday from his home in New Braunfels, Texas. His home is about 35 miles north of Sutherland Springs, where his son’s rampage occurred Sunday morning.
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Kelley’s son, Devin Kelley, opened fire on worshippers at the First Baptist Church around 11:20 a.m., strolling down the aisle of pews and shouting as he shot his victims.
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Devin’s gunfire killed 26 people, including an unborn child, and injured at least 20 more. According to Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt, no one escaped the church unscatched.
After the shooting, two heroic citizens chased Devin in a truck for about 10 miles. They watched him veer recklessly into a traffic sign and hit a guard rail before stopping his vehicle. Police later found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“I don’t want our lives, our grandchildren’s lives, destroyed by this media circus,” the gunman’s father continued, adding that the family has nothing else to say for the time being.
The “media circus” to which Kelley is likely referring is the amount of disturbing information surrounding his son’s life and potential motive.
Devin was a member of the US Air Force before he was discharged to a mental health facility for threatening officers and attempting to sneak guns onto the Holloman Air Force Base at which he was stationed.
He escaped from the New Mexico mental health hospital in 2012 while “attempting to carry out death threats” on officers, the El Paso Police Department said.
The FBI is currently investigating his Texas attack — which is now the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history — but they are not considering it to be an act of terrorism. Instead, authorities say Devin was targeting his mother-in-law, who sometimes attended the church, after a domestic incident.
