The
Hero of the Sutherland Springs Shooting Is Still Reckoning with What Happened
that Day
A year in the life of
Stephen Willeford, who disrupted the mass murder in his small town’s First
Baptist Church and became known as the ultimate good guy with a gun.
Issue November 2018
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A year in the life of Stephen Willeford, who
disrupted the mass murder in his small town’s First Baptist Church and became
known as the ultimate good guy with a gun.
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Stephen
Willeford had just taken a bite of chocolate cake when the stranger approached.
It was a warm evening in August, and Willeford was eating at Baldy’s American
Diner, just a few miles from his home in Sutherland Springs. He was in a dark
corner of the restaurant, out of sight of other patrons in the main dining
room, but the stranger and his wife happened to pass by on their way to the
restroom.
When the man
spotted Willeford, he lingered for a few seconds, staring.
“I’m
sorry to interrupt,” he said. He looked to be in his late thirties and
was wearing a faded U.S. Marine Corps T-shirt. “I
just have to say, you look really familiar, and I can’t figure out how I know
you. Can I ask your name?”
Willeford is
the sort of guy who blends into most crowds. At 56, he’s balding, a little
stocky, and moderate in height, about five feet, seven inches. He is gregarious
by nature, almost jolly, which is apt, because he sports a scruffy white Santa
Claus beard. His kids used to tease him because he seems to know someone
everywhere he goes, and even when he doesn’t, he makes fast friends with
strangers. But these days—ever since last November, when media crews from
around the world descended on his tiny hometown, the latest ground zero in a
mind-numbing string of mass shootings across the country—he knows all the
quietest corners of his favorite restaurants. His life barely resembles the one
he had before.
“My
name is Stephen,” he said, his voice gentle and slow.
The stranger
pondered this for a moment, but nothing clicked. “May
I ask what it is you do for a living?” By now the man’s wife had emerged
from the restroom and stood beside him, puzzled.
It had been
nearly a year since that awful November morning, and Willeford’s name and photo
had appeared in news stories around the world. The president of the United
States had praised him during a press conference and later shaken his hand. A
Fox News pundit had thanked God that he “came in and stepped up to the plate
and was courageous.”
Strangers had
sent gifts worth thousands of dollars and invited him on exotic,
all-expense-paid trips. Other strangers invoke his name daily while arguing on
Twitter. He’s become a coveted public speaker. In May, he appeared before
thousands at an NRA convention. Recently, when he addressed a crowd of roughly
two hundred at a church near Dallas, more than twenty men lined up to shake his
hand and pose for photos.
It had all
come to feel like a surreal, never-ending dream.
“I’m
a plumber,” Willeford said to the stranger, smiling.
This seemed
to be all the man needed. “I thought so,” he said. “I know who you are.” Then
he turned to his wife. “Honey, this is the guy who stopped the bad man.”
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24 of the victims of the Texas church shooting.
Texas
Church Shooting: Who Were the Victims of the Sutherland Springs Massacre?
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On most
Sunday mornings, Willeford would have been 45 minutes away, in San
Antonio, at the Church of Christ he and his family had attended since his kids
were young. But on November 5, 2017, he decided to stay home and rest up. He
was scheduled to be on call the upcoming week at San Antonio’s University
Hospital, and he knew he’d inevitably be summoned for a middle-of-the-night
plumbing emergency. He had drifted to sleep sometime before 11:30 a.m. when his
oldest daughter, Stephanie, came into his bedroom and woke him up. She asked if
he heard gunfire.
He did hear
something, but to Willeford it sounded like someone was tapping on the window.
He looked outside but didn’t see anyone. He pulled on a pair of jeans and went
to the living room, where the walls were less insulated. The sound was louder
there. It was definitely gunfire, he realized, but he couldn’t tell where it
was coming from.
He rushed
into a back room and opened his steel gun safe, where he stows his collection
of pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Without hesitation, he snatched one of his
AR-15s. He’d put the rifle together himself, swapping out parts and upgrading
here and there over the years. It was light, good for mobility, and could shoot
quickly. It wasn’t as accurate as some of his other rifles but good enough to
hit the bowling pins he and his friends used for targets. He loaded a handful
of rounds into the magazine.
Meanwhile,
Stephanie had jumped in her car to drive around the block to investigate.
Willeford’s neighborhood, in central Sutherland Springs, consists of modest
ranch-style homes and trailers. The town itself is tiny, about six hundred
people, a blue-collar agricultural community. Stephanie returned a minute or so
later. She told her father she had seen a man wearing black tactical gear at
the Baptist church just down the street, about 150 yards away.
Willeford and
his family know almost everyone who attends the church. Some of the elder
members of the congregation knew his great-grandparents. Each Christmas, he
rides his Harley with a motorcycle group from the church that delivers toys to
poor kids across the county.
He called his
wife, Pam, who was five miles away, drywalling the house the family was
building for their youngest daughter, Rachel, who was almost three months
pregnant at the time, and her husband. Willeford told Pam that there was an
active shooter at the church and asked her to stay put. The last thing he heard
before hanging up was her pleading, “Don’t go over there!”
Then he
barreled out the front door, down the street toward the church. He didn’t even
bother to put shoes on.
Stephanie
tried to follow, but he turned and asked her to go back inside and load another
magazine for him (he wanted to give her a task so she wouldn’t leave the
house).
As he
approached the old white chapel, he screamed as loud as he could, “Hey!” To this day, he’s not sure why—he knows that giving
away your position is foolish, tactically—but friends inside the church later
told him that when the gunman heard Willeford’s cry, he stopped shooting and
headed for the front door. “It was the Holy Spirit
calling the demon out of the church,” he tells people.
Just as
Willeford reached the front yard of Fred and Kathleen Curnow, whose house faces
the church entrance, a man wearing black body armor and a helmet with a visor
emerged from the church. Willeford scrambled behind the front tire of Fred’s
Dodge Ram. The gunman raised his pistol and fired three times. One bullet hit
the truck. One hit the Dodge Challenger parked behind him. One hit the house.
Willeford
propped his AR-15 on the pickup’s hood and peered through the sight. He could
see a holographic red dot on the man’s chest. He fired twice. He wasn’t sure
he’d hit him, though he was later told that the man had contusions on his chest
and abdomen consistent with getting shot while wearing body armor. Regardless,
the gunman stopped shooting and ran for a white Ford Explorer that was idling
outside the chapel, roughly twenty yards from where Willeford had positioned himself.
As the
shooter rounded the front of the Explorer, Willeford noticed that the man’s
vest didn’t cover the sides of his torso. Willeford fired twice more, striking
the man once beneath the arm—in an unprotected spot—and once in the thigh.
The man leaped
into the vehicle, slammed the door, and fired twice through the driver’s side
window. Willeford aimed for where he thought his target’s head would be and
pulled the trigger, shattering the driver’s side window completely. The
Explorer sped away, turning north onto FM 539, and Willeford ran into the
street and got off another shot, this time shattering the SUV’s rear window.
The vehicle
roared out of view. For a moment, it seemed he had gotten away. Then Willeford
looked to his left and noticed a navy-blue Dodge Ram stopped at a nearby
crossroad.
Johnnie
Langendorff, a 27-year-old who had driven down from Seguin,
thirty minutes north, that morning to visit his girlfriend, had arrived at the
intersection across the street from the church just as the gunman walked out
and began firing at Willeford. Langendorff had already dialed 911 when
Willeford, whom he’d never met, ran toward him, barefoot and brandishing a warm
AR-15.
“That
guy just shot up the church,” Willeford shouted. “We
need to stop him.”
The next
thing Willeford remembers hearing was the sound of Langendorff’s doors
unlocking. He hopped in the truck, and they sped after the Explorer.
Going north
from Sutherland Springs, FM 539 is a two-lane blacktop that winds around craggy
hills, through open pastures, past a handful of ranch houses toward Guadalupe
County. As they raced after the Explorer, Langendorff topped 90 miles per hour,
overtaking four or five other cars along the way. He stayed on the phone with
the 911 dispatcher and updated their location every time they passed a cross
street. They’d traveled seven or eight miles when they came around a bend and,
for the first time, spotted the Explorer a few hundred feet ahead.
“If
we catch him, we may have to put him off the road,” Willeford
said.
Langendorff
nodded. “I already figured that.”
As they
closed in on the SUV, it swerved back and forth across both lanes and then,
abruptly, careered off the road into a ditch. Langendorff pulled up about five
yards behind the Explorer. Willeford clutched the AR-15 in his right hand— he
only had two rounds remaining, not enough to survive another shootout—and
reached down to open the door with his left. Just as he was stepping out, the
Explorer peeled off, plowing through a street sign on its way back to the road.
Willeford closed his door. Langendorff stomped on the gas. The SUV made it only
a few hundred yards before veering off the road, smashing through a fence, and
rolling to a stop roughly thirty feet into a field.
Langendorff put the truck in park on the road,
about fifty yards from the Explorer. Willeford told Langendorff to duck under
the dash as he, for the second time in a span of ten minutes, posted up behind
the front tire of a Dodge Ram, perching his rifle on the hood. He screamed at
the man in the SUV, who didn’t budge or utter a sound. (He says he isn’t proud
of the language he used that day, that he was angry in the moment.) He’s not
sure how long he stayed there before hearing the voice of a police officer on a
PA behind him.
“Driver, put down your weapon and come
out with your hands up,”
Willeford remembers the officer saying. When the officer repeated himself, Willeford
laid his rifle on the hood and turned toward the squad car.
“Not you!” the officer shouted.
Soon, other officers arrived. To Willeford’s
recollection, there were a dozen, at least, from jurisdictions all over the
area. Rather than assault the vehicle, they decided to dispatch a drone to
inspect the SUV for any movement inside. An officer arrived with the drone
after nearly an hour, and through its camera they could see that the gunman was
dead in the driver’s seat. Willeford watched as the officers cautiously
converged on the Explorer, until they were close enough to peer through
the window. The fatal wound was a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.
Willeford
believes that what happened that day was a battle between good
and evil. He says he was terrified, but he thinks the calm he experienced was
the Holy Spirit taking over. He tells people he thinks it was the Lord’s hand
shielding him as the man doing evil fired over and over again in his direction.
And looking back now, he feels like God had been shaping him every day of his
life, carving him into the perfect tool for that day.
He grew up
with a deeply rooted love for his community, a devotion that was instilled in
him by previous generations. During the Depression, his great-grandfather
started a trade route between Sutherland Springs and Seguin, bolstering
business and helping farmers and shopkeepers in both towns stay afloat through
hard times. Growing up, Willeford worked at a local dairy owned by his family.
“I squeezed more tits before I was eight than you will your whole life,” he
likes to joke.
He started
shooting when he was 5 years old. His father had him aiming a bolt-action .22
rifle at Coke cans in the backyard. As he grew older, he was drawn to
competition shooting. By his mid-thirties, he could hit the string of a moving
balloon from a hundred yards away. With his instruction, all three of his kids,
who range in age from 23 to 28, were expert pistol shooters by the time they
turned 9. For years, his family’s Church of Christ Bible study group met at a
local gun range, gathering each week to shoot for a few hours before going over
Scripture.
He’d even had
discussions with a police officer friend, long before his encounter with the
gunman, about where to aim on a moving target wearing body armor: the side, the
hip, the leg. More preparation from God, he believes.
There was a
stretch in his life, starting in 1993, when he felt like the Old Testament
character Job. On the day before Willeford’s thirty-first birthday, his parents
were both killed by a drunk driver. They’d been out for a Labor Day motorcycle
ride when a man with four prior DWIs collided with them head-on. The accident
was on FM 539, not far from where he and Langendorff concluded their chase. A
few weeks later, an arsonist burned down his parents’ house—before he’d had
time to sort through his childhood memories.
The day after
his parents’ funeral, he and Pam learned she was pregnant. But during a
second-trimester checkup, there was no heartbeat. And not long after that, Willeford
lost his job. “We maintained our faith through all of
it, though,” he says.
So Willeford
is “no stranger to pain,” he says, but he remembers crying more the first week
after the shooting than he had the rest of his life combined. The first time came
on the side of the road, when he was talking to officers. Everything was just
so overwhelming.
He was at the
scene for four hours, answering questions from various agencies. Because the
chase had crossed county lines and because officers from several different
jurisdictions responded, Willeford had to tell his story to representatives
from three county sheriffs.Then there was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms, and Explosives. And then the Texas Rangers. (Later that night, he’d
have to repeat it all over again to the FBI and Department of Homeland
Security.)
His wife,
Pam, showed up at the scene within an hour, relieved to see Willeford
alive. He was still undergoing interviews, so she asked a few firefighters if
they could give him her Crocs. Even though it was late autumn, the temperature
had peaked at close to 90 degrees that day, and she worried about the torrid
asphalt against his bare feet.
Every time he
talked to someone new, Willeford wanted to know about the people in the church.
He wanted names. He wanted to know how many people were hurt. But he couldn’t
get a straight answer.
“How
bad is it?” he asked over and over.
For most of
the afternoon, he was convinced he’d be going to jail, despite repeated
assurances from the officers interviewing him. He’s always told people: if you
use your gun, even in self-defense, expect to spend a night in jail before
it’s all sorted out. He talked to five different law enforcement agencies,
but his worries were assuaged only after the district attorney for Wilson
County, Audrey Louis, introduced herself and put him at ease. She told him she
had friends in that church, and she gave him a hug.
When he
finally got home early that evening, the neighborhood was a chaotic mess of
police cars, reporters, stunned onlookers, and sobbing mourners. More than
twenty people awaited him inside his house: friends from San Antonio,
neighbors, extended family who’d heard about what had happened. Everyone was
calling, texting, waiting for the latest news on TV. That’s how Willeford and
his family first learned how bad it really was.
There were 26
dead and 20 injured. One victim was 77. Another was eighteen months old. Eight
of those murdered were children. One victim was pregnant. Three married couples
died together, as did a set of three young siblings. A family Willeford had
known for years, the Holcombes, lost nine members. Lead pastor Frank Pomeroy,
who typically carries a gun to services, was out of town that day, but his
14-year-old daughter was among the dead. Before going outside to shoot at
Willeford, the gunman had gone through fifteen 30-round magazines.
Willeford
assumed the reporting was wrong. The air felt thick and hard to breathe.
Nothing made sense.
At a press
conference that night, Governor Greg Abbott confirmed the grim facts. He
thanked the litany of officials and agencies who had responded to what they now
realized had been the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history. A Department of
Public Safety representative told the scrum of cameras that a local citizen had
responded to the shooting with his own rifle and then chased down the suspect.
A reporter asked if that citizen’s name was going to be released to the public.
The answer was no.
Willeford
went to bed feeling anonymous, which was fine with him. “We had no clue what
was about to happen,” he says.
Willeford
went to bed feeling anonymous, which was fine with him. Preferable, in fact.
“We had no clue what was about to happen,” he says.
Most mass
shootings barely even register with the American public
anymore. In 2017 alone, there were more than three hundred shooting incidents
in which at least four people were injured or killed, and few of them made
national headlines. Sutherland Springs was different, though.
For one, the
sheer number of victims was staggering. That it also happened in a small town,
the kind of tight-knit community where everyone knows everyone, contributed to
the shock. But there was another element that made the tragedy a singular
event. There was Stephen Willeford.
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The
only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. - Wayne
LaPierre
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/587709]
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For years,
the mass shootings that have garnered national attention have resulted in a
predictable public debate between advocates of stricter gun control measures
and people arguing that, as NRA leader Wayne LaPierre famously put it after
twenty schoolchildren were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012: “The only thing
that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Willeford had
become a lead character in a national debate. He was the ultimate good guy with
a gun.
When he woke
up the morning after the shooting, there were a few fleeting seconds
before he remembered what had happened and all the grief and sadness returned.
He got up and turned on the news, and he was surprised to see his name and face
on the screen. Soon he was staring at a live broadcast from his front yard.
For the next
few days, it seemed as though every fifteen minutes someone new knocked on his
door and asked to speak with him. Reporters from networks and newspapers all
across the world piled notes and business cards on his doorstep. He was
marooned in his own home. Eventually the sheriff warned reporters to stay off
his property or risk jail time. But officers also told him that he’d have to
give an interview at some point if he ever wanted the circus to move on.
One of the
first interviews he agreed to was with conservative YouTube personality Steven
Crowder (Willeford’s daughter Rachel is a fan). It was the day after the
shooting, and his emotions were still raw. “I’m having
all kinds of issues,” he confessed. “I can’t put
my finger on what my feelings are.”
He refused
attempts to lionize his efforts. “I want the focus to
go to the families, to the community that I grew up in, the people that I love
there, the people that I know,” he said. “The
church was a very small congregation, and [26] people are dead. Children are
dead. Twenty or so are injured. That’s decimated their congregation. There’s
very few left in their congregation.”
He became
emotional while lamenting the fact that he couldn’t grieve with the rest of the
community. “They’re having a memorial at the baseball
stadium, and the media’s gonna be there. Guess who can’t be there if the
media’s there? I wanna hug some of these people.”
Because
information within the community was unreliable at that point, and officials
had yet to release the names of the victims, “I don’t
even know which ones of my friends made it and which didn’t,” he told
Crowder.
In the
following days, several politicians arrived in town. Willeford spent time with
Senator Ted Cruz and Vice President Mike Pence. His district’s U.S. representative,
Henry Cuellar, invited him to be his one allotted guest at the 2018 State of
the Union Address. Later, Senator John Cornyn called.
One day in
December, not long after Willeford had gone back to work at the hospital, he
was repairing a steam leak with his supervisor when his cellphone buzzed. He
showed his boss who was calling: the office of Senator Cornyn. They wanted to
arrange a meeting when Willeford was in Washington, D.C., for the State of the
Union. He’d just gone back to fixing the leak when he got a call from Cuellar.
And not long after that, Cruz called.
In January,
Willeford and his wife were flown to Washington, D.C., for the State of the
Union. While there, they spent time with Cruz and Cornyn, and they were
escorted on special tours, right past the signs that read “No Tours Past Here.”
“I feel like
the prettiest girl at the prom,” Stephen told Pam. “Everyone wants to dance
with me.”
A few months
later, he was invited to be a guest of honor at the NRA’s national convention
in Dallas in May. The organization paid for a block of suites for him and his
family at the Omni Hotel, where, for the first time in his life, he ordered
room service. At the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, he
delivered a speech to a crowd of thousands. “We are the
people that stand between the people that would do evil to our neighbors,”
he said. “I’m nothing special. Look at you guys. Every
one of you would do what I did. And I love you all.” He received
multiple standing ovations.
In the halls,
everywhere he went, a crowd formed. There was an endless stream of handshakes
and photos, more thank-yous, more names he’d try to remember but wouldn’t. He
once again spent time with Cruz and Pence, and he had his picture taken
with Donald Trump. “I think I could meet Trump tomorrow
and he wouldn’t recognize me,” Willeford says. “But
Mike Pence would. And Ted Cruz knows me well.”
Willeford is
fully aware why he’s so popular among a certain segment of society. He knows
that he’s become a symbol; his actions that day make the perfect story for gun
rights advocates to tell. Not only did he use his personal firearm to stop an
active shooter, he did it with an AR-15, the same type of gun used in many mass
shootings, including this one. Willeford has starred in an NRA commercial. “It’s not the gun, it’s the heart,” he says. And he
agrees with many of the arguments strangers are making when they cite his
name. If AR-15s were banned, he would have been less well equipped to defend
himself and his friends, he says.
But he didn’t
ask to be a citation in someone else’s debate. His experience is more than a
data point. Those seven minutes ravaged his community.
All he ever
prayed for was a simple life. He wanted only to be a faithful man, a good
husband and father, an upstanding member of the rural community where his
family has resided for seven generations. He finds it strange to be constantly
thanked for—and reminded of—one of the most painful experiences of his life. He
says he can’t wait for a whole day to pass when it never comes up. He doesn’t
consider himself a hero. The word makes him uncomfortable.
“If
you’re breaking it down into heroes and survivors, I’d rather be with the
survivors,” he says. “I got shot at
too.”
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The
AR-15 given to Willeford by the founder of the San Antonio–based Sons of
Liberty Gun Works. [Photograph by LeAnn Mueller]
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Late this
summer, Willeford wanted to “put a few rounds through” a
new AR-15 given to him by the owner of the San Antonio–based Sons of Liberty
Gun Works, so he drove a few miles outside of town, onto the property that his
great-grandfather purchased with profits from that Depression-era trade route.
He entered the gate, and the shocks on his old Mercury Grand Marquis squeaked
as he rolled past a dozen mama cows and their calves. He made his way to the
back of the plot, where he maintains a makeshift gun range.
When the
owner of Sons of Liberty learned that the rifle Willeford had used on the
morning of the shooting had been confiscated and had yet to be returned, he
insisted on building him a new one. It’s painted a desert camouflage, with a
brown Texas flag on one side and a passage from Romans 13:4 on the other: For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong,
be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of
God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.
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Willeford
at the gun range on his family’s land. [Photograph by LeAnn Mueller]
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It’s one of
several guns presented to Willeford in the past year.
He loaded a
few rounds and aimed the AR-15 at a paper target fifty yards away. He took
three shots, and all three struck the two-inch-wide red bull’s-eye.
“Oh,
this is nice,” he said. “It’s lighter
than it looks.”
He pulled out
another AR-15 that had been given to him, painted like the Texas flag. That
one, he said as he loaded a magazine, is probably the most similar to the
custom rifle he used outside the church. He also fired off a few rounds with a
suppressed Daniel Defense 300 Blackout, a gift from a friend. When finished
with the rifles, he loaded his Kimber 1911 pistol. He tossed an empty water
bottle into the grass thirty or forty feet away and fired at it four, five, six
times, making the plastic bottle dance across the pasture. The entire
afternoon, he didn’t miss once.
He could have
stayed out there all day—and sometimes he does—but there were storm clouds on
the horizon, so Willeford packed each gun into its case and loaded them into
the trunk of the Grand Marquis. Then he drove slowly through an alleyway of
trees and paused beside a narrow stream that flows across the property. His
family’s plot used to be three times as big, but his older brother and younger
sister sold their portion of the land years ago, something that Willeford would
never consider. This is where he comes to think. Once, when a young man asked
permission to date his daughter, he brought him here to camp before
giving his blessing.
Currently he
rents the acreage to someone with a cattle business, which pays just enough to
cover the property tax. But Willeford’s dream is to one day build a house here.
And maybe a house for each of his children and their spouses, all of whom live
nearby. “We’d all be here, on my great-grandfather’s land,” he said. “The
grandkids could all run from house to house and play together.”
Over the
previous few months, he’d been approached by book publishers and speaking
agents offering potentially lucrative deals. He’d been told he could start a
security consulting company to help churches protect against shooters. He has
good reason to believe that the gun he used that day is the type of thing a
wealthy gun collector would be willing to pay a lot for. (Law enforcement
recently returned the rifle to him in a ceremony at the church.) Willeford
pondered whether this all might be a way to build his dream house.
He likes his
job at the hospital in San Antonio, where several children from the church were
treated after the shooting. He’s proud to tell people that every child treated
there that day is still alive. He doesn’t mind the hour-long commute, and the
benefits are great. He doesn’t want to take on anything that might jeopardize
that.
He worries
about Pam sometimes. She says she’s still in a fog, and she has trouble
sleeping. While he gets to talk about his experience all the time—which he
finds strange, but it’s a sort of therapy nonetheless—Pam mostly keeps to
herself. But she suffered trauma that day too.
She still
remembers his phone call, remembers rinsing the drywall off her hands and
rushing to the church with her daughter Rachel. She remembers Rachel comforting
a young girl outside who’d lost her mother and three siblings. Rachel asked the
girl about her favorite movie. As the two of them sat together and began
singing songs from Moana, Pam noticed blood matted in the girl’s hair.
That’s when it struck her how bad this really was.
She searched for Willeford but found only the brass
shells he’d left behind. She heard there had been a crash and insisted her
daughter not go with her to the scene. She didn’t know what she’d find when she
got there.
Now, she often travels with Willeford—to Dallas, to
Washington, D.C., to his various speeches. As people line up to thank him, to
shake his hand and marvel at what he did that day, Pam mostly stays to herself,
texting her kids or scrolling through pictures of their granddaughter. She’s
supportive of her husband, but like Willeford, she’s unsure what they’re
supposed to do next.
So this is what they pray about most.
“We’re just looking for some direction,” he says.
Before the massacre, the average attendance at the church was about fifty people. Now it’s around two hundred. Against all odds, it has become a place of healing.
Willeford sees the crosses outside the Baptist church every day. Each
bears the name of a victim. He sees the impromptu memorial that formed along
the fence beside the chapel. It’s still up, nearly a year later. Most of the
flowers have wilted, but new tributes to loved ones still show up on occasion.
Just seeing the little white building, which has been the center of town since
long before Willeford’s time, is a constant reminder.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the
community expected that the old chapel, the site of so much carnage, would
be demolished. But it wasn’t. The pews were removed, the windows were replaced,
the walls and ceiling were painted white. The room became a memorial, with
white chairs marking where each victim was sitting that morning.
Thanks to donations that came in after the
shooting, the church is erecting a new building—much bigger than the one
before—in what was an empty field on the same plot of land. For now, the
congregation gathers for Sunday services inside a temporary building on the
property. Before the massacre, the average attendance at the church was about
fifty people. Now it’s almost two hundred.
Willeford’s family had always attended the Church
of Christ. That’s where he was raised and where he and Pam raised their three
kids. (They used to joke that Church of Christers went to Sunday services
earlier so they could beat the Baptists to lunch.) But the church was 45
minutes away, in San Antonio, and after the shooting, he wanted to worship
alongside his fellow survivors. That’s what compelled him to join the Baptist
church this summer.
Soon after, at a Sunday service in June, Willeford
met Danielle Kelley. Her husband was the man in tactical gear that morning, the
man who’d caused all this pain, the man Willeford had shot twice. Kelley’s
mother is a longtime member of First Baptist. Neither woman was there during
the shooting, but Kelley’s grandmother was among those killed.
Willeford talked to Kelley for only a few minutes
that day, but he often replays the conversation in his mind. She told him she
didn’t feel any ill will toward him, that she understood he’d done the right
thing. Willeford was grateful. He doesn’t regret his pursuit of the gunman, but
he’s glad he didn’t have to fire the fatal shot. “We
aren’t designed to take the life of another person,” he says. “It damages us. It changes us.”
Kelley told Willeford she was focusing on raising
her two children, both under the age of four, as a single mother. He realized
that her baby and his granddaughter were born less than a year apart. If they
both grow up here, they’ll almost certainly know each other.
Then the young mother mentioned her deceased
husband.
“You know,” she said, “he wasn’t always evil. He
just lost himself.”
Willeford said he knew exactly what she meant. He
told her about his older brother, Delbert, who’s serving twenty years in
Colorado for attempted murder. He’d been a good man, successful in business,
always kind to Willeford’s kids. “But one day he lost himself too.”
Willeford told her he believes that evil spirits
can enter into anyone’s life if they allow it. Then he asked the woman if they
could pray together.
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Willeford doesn’t have nightmares about that day. Or, if he does, he’s fortunate not to remember them when he wakes up.
Willeford doesn’t have nightmares about that day. Or, if he does, he’s
fortunate not to remember them when he wakes up. Most of the time it’s not
difficult for him to maintain a positive outlook. He knows there is far more
good in this world than bad.
But sometimes his thoughts can wander.
Occasionally he asks himself: “How could anyone see
a crying child and shoot them?”
And now that
investigators have reviewed video of the event, Willeford knows the order in
which the victims were shot. Survivors have told him exactly what was happening
the moment they heard him yelling outside—the second the gunman stopped
executing people and left.
So in those
moments, when his mind is unoccupied, here is what Willeford is fated to
ponder: if he’d arrived fifteen seconds sooner, Kris Workman might still be
able to walk. If he had been there a minute earlier, Workman’s mother, Julie,
might not have a bullet hole in her leg. If he’d gone running when he first
heard the tapping on his bedroom window, maybe he could have saved some of
the children.
When these
thoughts start to consume him, he’s learned to remind himself he did the best
he could. Sometimes, to get his mind off of it, he spends time with his
four-month-old granddaughter. Sometimes he walks across the street to his
friend Mike Jordan’s house.
Willeford
doesn’t drink much—he’s never had more than two beers in one sitting—but he
enjoys hanging out on Jordan’s front porch, sipping his buddy’s home brew. On
most Saturday nights, Willeford and some of his closest friends gather at
Jordan’s. They each bring a gun or two, drink one of Jordan’s latest
concoctions, and trade crude jokes and old stories.
On a recent
Saturday, they downed a homemade IPA as one of Willeford’s friends showed off
his new AR-15. Jordan brought out his .454 pistol, while Willeford proudly
displayed the rifle he was given by the Sons of Liberty. He passed it to
Jordan, who read from the Bible verse printed on its side. Jordan checked the
chamber to make sure it was empty before pressing it to his shoulder to look
through the sight.
“Nice,” he
said.
As he handed
it back to Willeford, Jordan told the group, with a smile, that if he had been
home that day, it all would have been different. “I can
see the church doors from my bathroom window,” he said. He would have
responded the same way Willeford had, only he would have shared the free guns
with his friends, he teased.
Willeford
just laughed and shook his head.
They stayed
there on the porch, drinking and talking—about the time Jordan hit a water line
while shooting at a skunk; about how the media shouldn’t use meaningless
phrases like “assault rifle”; about whether there will be a circus surrounding
the one-year anniversary in a few weeks—till it was nearly midnight.
Willeford was
up early for breakfast at church the next morning, though. Before the sermon,
Pastor Pomeroy led a Bible study over coffee and biscuits in one of the church’s
large classrooms behind the old chapel. On this day, there were about forty
adults in the room, with a few kids darting in and out.
Before the
discussion began, Willeford made his way around the room to greet as many
people as possible. At one table was David Colbath, who was shot eight times
that day. At another was Jennifer Holcombe, who lost her husband and
eighteen-month-old daughter in the shooting in addition to seven other family
members. Willeford waved to a little girl whose pelvis had been shattered by a
bullet. The room was full of people healing together.
When everyone
had taken a seat, Pomeroy, who was still mourning the death of his own
daughter, explained that today’s discussion would be about the book of Acts,
chapter 16, in which the disciple Paul figured out what God wanted for
him—something that seems particularly relevant to the lives of the survivors
right now.
“You can see,
God doesn’t speak in a thunderous voice,” Pomeroy told the group. Others around
the room agreed.
Willeford
nodded. Then he interjected, “Sometimes I wish he would.”
“Remember,”
Pomeroy said, “man can’t always comprehend God’s plans.”
“I know,”
Willeford said. “But if God would just tell me what to do, I’d run at it like a
bulldog.”
Soon they all
walked over to the temporary building where the church currently holds Sunday
services. As Willeford settled in for the sermon, there was an announcement:
instead of Pomeroy’s preaching, the congregation would be treated to a
presentation by the children from the church’s vacation Bible school. For
nearly an hour, Stephen and Pam watched three dozen children sing and dance and
perform skits about dedicating themselves to Jesus Christ.
“This,”
he whispered, “is the future of Sutherland Springs.”
When the
service ended, the Willefords lingered, catching up with some of the other
survivors until it was close to 1 p.m. Then they headed home, past the small
white chapel, past the site of the shoot-out, past the flowers and crosses in
the makeshift memorial, and past the church’s marquee. The top of the sign is
blue, with an image of a white dove and a Bible next to a cross. Below that it
reads, “Evil did not win!”
This article
originally appeared in the November 2018 issue of Texas
Monthly with the headline “The Hero’s Burden.” Subscribe today.
INTERNET SOURCE: https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/stephen-willeford-sutherland-springs-mass-murder/
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