SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas — On Monday, crews began demolishing a Texas church where a gunman was more than two dozen believers killed in 2017With the help of heavy equipment, the small building was demolished, even after some families wanted to preserve the accident site. the deadliest church shooting in US history.
Last month, a judge granted First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs permission to demolish the sanctuary where the attack took place, which until now had been preserved only as a memorial.
Members of First Baptist voted in 2021 to demolish the building amid protests from some in the small community. Authorities estimate that 26 people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn baby, died in the Nov. 5, 2017, shooting.
John Riley, an 86-year-old member of the church, watched with sadness and disappointment as the long arm of a yellow excavator slammed its heavy claw into the building again and again.
“The devil got his way,” Riley said, “I wouldn’t be the man I am without that church.”
He said he would pray that God would “punish those” who initiated the demolition.
“That was God’s house, not their house,” Riley said.
A new church was completed for the community approximately one and a half years after the shooting.
Earlier this summer, a Texas judge granted a temporary restraining order sought by some of the families. But another judge later denied a request to extend that restraining order, setting the demolition in motion. In court documents, lawyers for the church called the structure a “constant and deeply painful reminder.”
A woman who answered the phone at the church on Monday said she had no comment and then hung up.
The man who opened fire at the church, Devin Patrick Kelley, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was chased by bystanders and crashed his car. Investigators have said the shooting appeared to stem from a domestic dispute between Kelley and his mother-in-law, who sometimes attended church services but was not there on the day of the shooting.
Communities in the US have struggled with what should happen to the places where mass shootings took place. Demolition started last month on the three-storey building where 17 persons died in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School In Connecticut it was demolished and replaced.
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Stengle reported from Dallas.