SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas — Crews began demolishing a Texas church where a gunman killed more than two dozen worshipers in 2017 on Monday, using heavy machinery to level the small building even after some families sought to preserve the scene of the deadliest church shooting in U.S. history.
Last month, a judge allowed First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs to demolish the sanctuary where the attack took place, which had until now been kept as a memorial. The decision came after some families filed a lawsuit earlier this year in hopes of getting a new vote on the building’s fate after church members voted in 2021 to demolish it.
Authorities estimated that the Nov. 5, 2017, shooting left 26 people dead, including a pregnant woman and her unborn baby.
John Riley, an 86-year-old church member, watched in sadness and disappointment as the long arm of a yellow excavator swung a heavy claw into the building repeatedly.
“The devil won,” Riley said, “I wouldn’t be the man I am without this church.”
He said he would pray that God “punishes 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.
In early July, a Texas judge granted a temporary restraining order requested by some families. But another judge later denied a request to extend that order, prompting the demolition. In court filings, the church’s attorneys called the structure a “constant and very painful reminder.”
The church’s lawyers argued it was within its rights to tear down the memorial, while the attorney for the families who filed the lawsuit said they were simply hoping to get a new vote.
In the complaint, the plaintiffs alleged that some church members were wrongfully removed from the church’s membership rolls before the vote. In a court filing, the church denied the allegations in the complaint.
A woman who answered the phone at the church Monday said she had no comment, then hung up.
The man who opened fire at the church, Devin Patrick Kelley, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after being chased by bystanders and crashing his car. Investigators said the shooting appeared to have stemmed from a domestic dispute between Kelley and his mother-in-law, who sometimes attended services at the church but was not there the day of the shooting.
Communities across the United States are grappling with what to do with the sites of mass shootings. Last month, demolition began on the three-story building where 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 torn down and replaced.
Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, New York, and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where racist mass shootings occurred, have both reopened. In Colorado, Columbine High School still stands, although its library, where most of the victims were killed, has been replaced.
In Texas, officials closed Robb Elementary School in Uvalde after the 2022 shooting and plan to demolish the school.
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Stengle reported from Dallas.
