The U.S. Air Force must pay more than $230 million in damages to survivors and victims’ families of a 2017 Texas church massacre for failing to flag a conviction that might have kept the gunman from legally buying the weapon used in the shooting, a federal judge ruled in San Antonio on Monday.
More than two dozen people were killed, including eight children, when Devin Patrick Kelley opened fire during a Sunday service at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs. Kelley, who died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after being shot and chased by two men who heard the gunfire at the church, had served in the Air Force before the attack.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez had ruled in July that the Air Force was “60% liable” for the attack because it failed to submit Kelley’s assault conviction during his time in the Air Force to a national database.
An Air Force record of the Kelley court-martial says he pleaded guilty to multiple specifications of assault, including striking his wife, choking her with his hands and kicking her. He also was convicted of striking his stepson on the head and body “with a force likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm.”
In 2012, several months before his conviction in the domestic violence case, Kelley briefly escaped from a mental health center in New Mexico and got in trouble for bringing guns onto a military base and threatening his superiors there, police reports indicate.
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Deputies were called to Kelley’s home in New Braunfels in June 2013 about the rape case and investigated for three months, Comal County Sheriff Mark Reynolds said. But it appeared that they stopped investigating after they believed Kelley left Texas and moved to Colorado. Reynolds said the case was then listed as inactive.
Under Pentagon rules, information about convictions of military personnel in crimes like assault is supposed to be submitted to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Investigation Services Division for inclusion in the National Criminal Information Center database.
For unspecified reasons, the Air Force did not provide the information about Kelley as required.
Lawyers for survivors and relatives of those killed in the massacre had asked for $418 million, while the Justice Department proposed $31.8 million. Jamal Alsaffar, the Austin lawyer who led the plaintiffs’ legal team, was pleased with the judge’s award.
“These families are the heroes here. While no amount can bring back the many lives lost or destroyed at the hands of the government’s negligence, their bravery in obtaining this verdict will make this country safer by helping ensure that this type of governmental failure does not happen in our country again,” he said.
Messages left Monday by The Associated Press with the Justice Department and Air Force were not immediately returned.
The approximately 80 claimants include relatives of those killed in the massacre and 21 survivors and their families. Authorities put the official death toll at 26 because one of the 25 people killed was pregnant.
Terry Wallace is Breaking News Supervisor for the Associated Press.
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5 Responses
There are about 300 to 400 million guns floating about in the U.S..
Seemingly anyone can get hold of a gun if needed, and massacres can happen in any venue, which in this case was a church. Then people can sue any organization with deep pockets.
I wonder when evangelicals pontificate about God, Guns and Country… this is what they are talking about…. the U.S. is an embarassment….
We could talk about God, Abortion on Demand, the King of Beers, and the Marlboro Man. Abortion, the leading cause of violent death among children, killing over 625,000 in 2019 in the U.S. Alcohol is responsible for around 95,000 deaths each year with around 10,000 from DUI alone. The Marlboro Man is representative of the tobacco industry that also kills around 480,000 each year in the U.S.
These three areas account for over 1 million deaths each year in the U.S. In contrast, in 2020 there were a little over 45,000 gun related deaths, more than half of which were by suicide. So it would seem that those millions of guns aren’t doing a very good job of killing millions of people.
Mass shootings are always shocking, and our media always makes sure to replay the carnage over and over to firmly imprint the images in our minds. It’s even more heart-rending when the carnage involves children unless it’s the carnage where what used to be children is found in a dumpster after being thrown out as medical waste. I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing.
“the U.S. is an embarassment….” Yes, one of life’s truisms now… (One I’ve come to over time and although it’s not something to wish for, it does have one upside. As a former right-leaning Christian on the edge of joining today’s Christian nationalist fad, I can testify to the freedom from the idolatry-of-nation that plagues our churches today, Through various circumstances and events I finally saw that america is not exceptional, or if it is, it’s exceptional in mostly bad ways.
If you take the rose-colored glasses off and see these realities, all that misplaced love melts away and you’re left with where we should be in the first place. Jesus is Lord over all nations; He lifts them up and tears them down and none of them, including the USA get His favoritism. We love the people of the nation and all nations, but we do not worship or favor the entity… Admitting america’s ugliness helps to keep this in perspective.
It’s not so much America that is ugly. We’ve made the world ugly. We have more of everything than any prior generation, and yet are on par unhappier than any similarly situated generation. What we do lack is an abundance of peace. But dare I or anyone else make a claim that the world is any uglier or more evil than God says? Do I declare judgment upon my country for sins, real and imagined, without starting with my own sin? Doesn’t God still love Israel even though He has judged her repeatedly? Israel isn’t a country of believers at all, and yet God’s city is still Jerusalem.
For Christians this shouldn’t be about right or left wing politics. It should be about being salt and light in a world that God said was good when He created it and which we’ve made dark. I also know there’s no solution at the end of a gun. It just so happens that governments the world over led by megalomaniacs don’t happen to agree with me. And then there are those in this country who would do harm to the helpless. Since we’ve turned law enforcement officers into pariahs to whom we ascribe evil intent, people in many areas are now responsible for their own security. Few of us can afford the private security many of our elected officials utilize even though they would have us defenseless, but God has not forbidden self-defense.
There would be fewer people shot in church if more congregations were prepared to return fire. See Luke 11:21.