Sutherland Springs, Texas: The US was in mourning on Monday after a gunman wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire with an assault rifle on the congregation of a small-town Texas church, killing 26 people, including 12-14 children, and wounding 20 more in the nation’s latest shooting massacre.
Authorities said they believe the gunman fatally shot himself after being chased from the crime scene. The assailant has been formally identified as 26-year-old Devin Kelley. “At this time we believe that he had a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Wilson county sheriff Joe Tackitt told CBS News.
Mr Tackitt recounted how a local citizen — who was also armed — had engaged, and then pursued the gunman as he exited the First Baptist Church. He said Kelley apparently shot himself after crashing his vehicle. The Air Force has confirmed that Kelley served at a base in New Mexico starting in 2010 before being court-martialed in 2012 on charges of assaulting his wife and child.
The carnage in Sutherland Springs, a rural community of some 400 people southeast of San Antonio, came just five weeks after the worst gun massacre in modern US history, when a gunman killed 58 people at an open-air concert in Las Vegas. Monday’s victims ranged in age from five to 72. The massacre killed about four per cent of the small town’s population, CNN reported.
At least eight of the people killed were members of one family, according to a relative and a community leader. A pregnant woman and the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter were among the dead. Police have identified all but one of the deceased. Nearly everyone in the church at the time of the shooting had some type of injury, Mr Tackitt said.
