Air Force’s failure to flag man who killed Texas churchgoers probed

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas -- The massacre of more than two dozen churchgoers -- the youngest of whom was just 18 months old -- occurred amid an ongoing "domestic situation" involving the gunman and his relatives, some of whom had attended the church, law enforcement officials said Monday.

Also on Monday, the Air Force began an internal review into why it failed to provide key information to the FBI that should have prevented the attacker from purchasing firearms. While serving in the Air Force, the gunman -- Devin Patrick Kelley, 26 -- was convicted by a general court-martial on two charges of domestic assault.

Under Pentagon rules, information about convictions of military personnel in crimes like assault should be submitted to the FBI's Criminal Justice Investigation Services Division.

The Air Force acknowledged that his offense was not entered into the database, which meant he was able to pass background checks to purchase weapons. Kelley was convicted of assaulting his then-wife and stepson and served 12 months in confinement before being released in 2014 with a bad-conduct discharge.

In his court-martial, Kelley admitted that he had repeatedly struck, kicked and choked his wife beginning just months into their marriage. He also said he had repeatedly hit his young stepson's head with his hands, cracking his skull, said Don Christensen, a retired colonel who was the chief prosecutor for the Air Force.

"Federal law prohibited him from buying or possessing firearms after this conviction," Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokesman, said in a statement.

The statement said that Heather Wilson, Air Force secretary, and Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, had ordered the Air Force inspector general to work with the Pentagon's inspector general to "conduct a complete review of the Kelley case and relevant policies and procedures."

The Air Force also said it was looking into whether other convictions had been improperly left unreported. "The service will also conduct a comprehensive review of Air Force databases to ensure records in other cases have been reported correctly," the statement said.

The Defense Department has reported only one domestic-violence case to the federal database for gun-purchase background checks, records show. It has reported 11,000 service members to the database, but almost all of them were because of dishonorable discharges, which prohibit gun purchases.

While authorities have not publicly identified a motive for the attack, they emphasized on Monday that the shooting did not appear to be fueled by racial or religious issues, as has been the case with other rampages at U.S. houses of worship. Instead, they pointed to the gunman's problems with his relatives, saying that Kelley had been sending "threatening texts" to his mother-in-law, who was not at the First Baptist Church when he opened fire on the congregation Sunday morning.

"This was not racially motivated; it wasn't over religious beliefs," Freeman Martin, a regional director with the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a news briefing Monday. "There was a domestic situation going on within the family and the in-laws."

Kelley's anger boiled into what appeared to be a planned assault on the church in a tiny town outside San Antonio. Kelley killed 26 people and injured 20 others, most of whom were praying in the pews when they faced a stream of bullets from an assault-style rifle.

According to military officials and authorities in three states, the 26-year-old Kelley had a history of threatening loved ones with violence.

In 2014, sheriff's deputies arrived at his family's home in New Braunfels, about 35 miles north of Sutherland Springs, one night to investigate a potential domestic-violence case.

Citing a sheriff's office report, Comal County spokesman Paul Anthony said a friend of Kelley's girlfriend told authorities she received a text message from the girlfriend that indicated "her boyfriend was abusing her."

When sheriff's deputies arrived, people at the home said there was a "misunderstanding," according to the report. It doesn't make clear who spoke to deputies. No arrests were made.

Kelley married the woman two months later.

Also in 2014, he was charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty in Colorado after a neighbor reported him for beating a dog. Kelley initially refused to speak with officers about the incident. He denied abusing the animal but complied with an order to pay almost $370 in restitution. He was also the focus of a protective order issued in Colorado in 2015.

8 dead span 3 generations

Among the dead at the church were eight relatives spanning three generations in a single family; the victims included toddlers, teenagers and the elderly. While authorities initially said the victims ranged in age from 5 to 72, they said Monday that those people were the wounded, and that the death toll encompassed even younger and older people.

"Inside the church, the deceased actually ranged from 18 months to 77 years of age," Martin said.

The family that lost eight relatives said one of them was a 1-year-old girl. Among the 20 wounded Sunday at the church, 10 remained hospitalized in critical condition, Martin said. Almost everyone at the service was injured in some way.

Investigators collected hundreds of shell casings from the church, along with 15 empty magazines that held 30 rounds each.

Once the shooting started, there was probably "no way" for congregants to escape, Wilson County Sheriff Joe D. Tackitt Jr. said.

The gunman, dressed in black tactical gear, fired as he walked down the center aisle during worship services. He turned around and continued shooting on his way out of the building, Tackitt said.

Texas authorities on Monday officially identified Kelley as the attacker. They said the former Air Force member shot at the churchgoers with a Ruger assault-style rifle before a local man who lives near the church heard what was happening and began firing his own rifle at the attacker, hitting him at least once.

Kelley then dropped his rifle, jumped in his Ford Expedition SUV, and fled, Martin said.

During the chase, Kelley called his father on his cellphone to say "he had been shot and didn't think he was going to make it," Martin said.

Based on evidence at the scene, investigators believe Kelley died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he crashed his car.

Three guns were recovered Sunday, according to authorities: a Ruger rifle and two handguns, one a Glock and another a Ruger, inside Kelley's vehicle. He had purchased a total of four guns during the past four years, officials said.

In televised interviews, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said it appeared the church was intentionally targeted, rather than chosen at random, but said there were "more unknowns than there are knowns" a day after the attack.

"By all of the facts that we seem to know, he was not supposed to have access to a gun, so how did this happen?" Abbott said in an interview Monday morning on CNN.

Though Kelley's in-laws had attended the church, they were not there during services Sunday, and instead came to the scene after the shooting, Tackitt said.

Kelley worked briefly over the summer as an unarmed night security guard at a Schlitterbahn water park in New Braunfels, the company said. He passed a Texas Department of Public Safety criminal background check before beginning work there, a spokesman said, though she added that Kelley was fired in July.

He then was hired as a security guard at the Summit Vacation Resort, also in New Braunfels. A manager there, Claudia Varjabedian, said Kelley "seemed like a nice guy."

Trump: Not about guns

President Donald Trump appeared to try to steer the debate away from gun control after the slayings. At a news conference in Tokyo, Trump said he thought "mental health" was a possible motive, adding that it appeared the shooter was "a very deranged individual, a lot of problems for a long period of time."

"This is a mental health problem at the highest level," Trump said.

With Trump in the midst of an overseas trip, Vice President Pence said Monday that he would travel to Sutherland Springs later this week to visit with victims, their relatives and law enforcement officials.

Trump said the Texas incident Sunday “isn’t a guns situation,” and added: “Fortunately someone else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction” or the rampage “would have been much worse.”

No one inside the church was armed at the time of the attack, the sheriff said Monday, saying he was not surprised by that fact.

“People from this community would never think this could happen,” he said.

Information for this article was contributed by Eva Ruth Moravec, Mark Berman, Mary Lee Grant, Peter Holley, Wesley Lowery, Brian Murphy, Kristine Phillips, Alex Horton, Samantha Schmidt, Devlin Barrett and Ashley Parker of The Washington Post; by Robert Burns, Frank Bajak, Nomaan Merchant, Paul J. Weber, Jim Vertuno, Will Weissert and staff members of The Associated Press; and by David Montgomery, Richard A. Oppel Jr., Jose A. Delreal of The New York Times.

A Section on 11/07/2017