SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas — Crews on Monday began demolishing a Texas church where a gunman killed more than two dozen worshipers in 2017with heavy machinery to demolish the small building even after some families tried to preserve the scene the deadliest church shooting in US history.
A judge last month cleared the way for the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs to demolish the sanctuary where the attack took place, which until now had been kept as a memorial.
Members of First Baptist voted in 2021 to demolish the building over the protests of some in the small community. Authorities put the death toll in the Nov. 5, 2017, shooting at 26 people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child.
John Riley, an 86-year-old member of the church, watched with sadness and disappointment as the long arm of a yellow excavator swung a heavy claw into the building again and again.
“The devil had his way,” Riley said, “I wouldn’t be the man I am without that church.”
He said he would pray for God to “punish those” who started the demolition.
“It was God’s house, not their house,” Riley said.
A new church was completed for the congregation about a year and a half after the shooting.
Earlier this summer, a Texas judge granted a temporary restraining order sought by some families. But another judge later denied a request to extend that order, setting the demolition in motion. In court filings, church attorneys called the structure a “constant and very painful reminder.”
A woman who answered the phone at the church said Monday 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 involving Kelley and his mother-in-law, who sometimes attended services at the church but was not present on the day of the shooting.
Communities across the United States have grappling with what would happen to the sites of mass shootings. Demolition began last month in the three-story building there 17 people 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.