Kathmand : novem 11/26/2017 Sunday >Beauty Nepal< Birbal Tamang.
Nearly three weeks after a gunman stormed into the Sutherland Springs Baptist Church
in Texas and massacred 26 people in the worst mass shooting in the
state’s history, the church’s pastor says he is struggling to deal with
his grief and that his sadness is compounded by guilt over what he might
have done to stop the shooting.
Speaking to the New York Times
in his first interview since the attack, Pastor Frank Pomeroy said he
regularly carried a concealed weapon when he preached on Sunday
mornings. But on Nov. 5, he was absent from the pulpit, attending a gun
training class hundreds of miles away in Oklahoma City when he got a
text message from the church’s videographer that read: “Shooting at
church.”
Pomeroy
tells the Times he thought the text message was a joke at first, but
the camera operator, who was shot, told him it wasn’t. The pastor began
frantically calling others in the church, trying to find out what had
happened. But the phones just rang and rang. More than half of those
inside the small community church were dead, including Pomeroy’s
14-year-old daughter, Annabelle, while another 20 were wounded.
The
weeks since have been a blur of funerals, hospital visits to the
wounded and meetings with insurance companies, lawyers and others about
the future of the church. Pomeroy tells the Times that, as a pastor, he
has tried his best to offer comfort to his grieving congregation and
that they, in turn, have tried to console him, but that he is
struggling.
“I
feel that I am not grieving as adequately as I should. I feel pretty
weak right now, a bit shaky,” Pomeroy said. “It is hard to be strong for
everyone else when I have my own heartache. But each day I am able to
function a little better.
But
Pomeroy said he struggles with guilt wondering if he might have been
able to stop the gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, had he been there
that morning. None of the other church members had been armed that
morning.
“In a way, I think that if I were there I could have done more,” the pastor told the Times. “But who is to say?”
Weeks
later, police still have yet to offer a specific motive in the case.
They have said Kelley was engaged in a “domestic dispute” with his
mother-in-law, Michelle Shields, who regularly attended the church but
was not there that morning. According to police, Shields, whose
22-year-old daughter Danielle had been married to Kelley since 2014,
received “threatening text messages” from the gunman ahead of the attack
— though it remains unclear exactly when those texts were sent.
According
to Pomeroy, Shields missed church that morning because she was at home
with her grandson. But her mother, Lula Woicinski White, was killed.
The
Shields family has offered no public comment on the attack — silence
that has been largely matched by the gunman’s own immediate family,
including his parents. Kelley and his wife lived in a converted barn
behind his parents’ home on a sprawling wooded property in New
Braunfels, about an hour north of Sutherland Springs, though the couple
was reportedly estranged.
Pomeroy
tells the Times he knew Kelley and that he had attended services at the
church “once or twice a year” with his wife. He would sit in the back
and often made “snide remarks” about the church, making clear to the
pastor that he was a nonbeliever.
“I
tried to talk to him a few times but he wouldn’t listen or engage,”
Pomeroy told the Times. “He acted entitled and spoke often in a harsh
and ugly way. He seemed like an angry person who had never been taught
to treat people the right way.”
Just
days before the shooting, on Halloween, the gunman had attended the
church’s annual fall festival, where the pastor recalled it “seemed like
he was glaring at everybody he walked by.” But Pomeroy said even as
cold as Kelley was to him and others in the church, he never anticipated
him having “the guts or courage” to attack the church as he did.
“My
opinion is that he was going to the church to find the mother-in-law
and was planning to shoot everybody on that side of the family,” Pomeroy
said. “I think he came there for them but intended to do something much
bigger.”
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