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Phil Bredesen is a Democrat who thinks he can win in Tennessee. He might be right.

Then-Gov. Phil Bredesen talks about his eight years in office during a 2010 interview in Nashville. (Photo: Mark Humphrey/AP)

FRANKLIN, Tenn. — For Tennessee Republicans, Williamson County has long been considered the promised land — one of the reddest counties in what has increasingly become one of the reddest states in the country.

An affluent suburb south of Nashville, Williamson is idyllic, with quaint main streets and rolling green hills where some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War took place. But in state politics, it is regarded as the land of surrender for Democrats, a county so firmly controlled by Republicans at every level that the other party often barely competes.

Just one Democrat has won here in the last 20 years — and as it happens, that candidate, former Gov. Phil Bredesen, was back in town on a recent Monday afternoon looking for votes. Nearly eight years after leaving the governor’s office, Bredesen, 74, recently emerged from political retirement to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Bob Corker, the moderate Republican and off-and-on critic of President Trump who announced last fall that he would not seek reelection.

Bredesen is not just any other Democrat in Tennessee. One of the most popular public officials in state history, the former Nashville mayor and businessman won two terms in the governor’s office and was the last Democrat to win a statewide election in this firmly red state thanks to a broad base of bipartisan support. His surprise decision to jump into the race in December put Tennessee’s Senate campaign on the national map, giving Democrats a slim chance at regaining control of the U.S. Senate this fall and an opportunity to reestablish a foothold in a region where the party has been largely wiped out.

But on the campaign trail the former governor rarely, if ever, mentions his own party affiliation. And he pointedly ignores questions about the national significance of the race. Unlike other Democrats this election year who have placed their opposition to Trump at the center of their campaign, Bredesen, a political centrist, has strenuously worked to avoid being cast as a member of the resistance. When Bredesen does mention the president, it is to declare, as he did in a recent campaign ad, that he is “not running against Donald Trump” but rather “to represent the people of Tennessee.”

Bredesen’s careful middle-of-the-road approach is a study in contrast with his likely opponent: U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a hard-charging, eight-term member of the House with one of the most conservative voting records in Washington.

A regular on the 24-hour cable news circuit, Blackburn, 65, has been one of Trump’s most passionate allies. And she has made that loyalty to the president front and center in her Senate bid, embracing him and his agenda in ways that other Republicans have not during this closely watched midterm election year. “People want to have a U.S. Senate that’s going to support the president,” Blackburn has said. “I will stand with President Trump.”

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., center, at a congressional listening session with President Trump and Rep. Billy Long, R-Mo., left, at the White House last February. (Photo: Ron Sachs/Pool via CNP)

In a video announcing her Senate bid last fall, Blackburn, whose home district includes Williamson County, came out guns blazing, telling voters about the pistol she packs in her purse. She declared war on her own party, calling out Senate Republicans who “act like Democrats or worse,” and ticked off the ways she would support Trump’s agenda, including on immigration.

Describing herself as “hard-core” and “politically incorrect and proud of it,” Blackburn embraced her reputation as a conservative firebrand. “I know the left calls me a wingnut, or a knuckle-dragging conservative. And you know what? I say that’s all right, bring it on.”

In an equally fiery speech in late February to Williamson County Republicans, Blackburn, who still faces a likely primary challenge, blasted unnamed Democrats who would dare think they could try to win the Senate seat or any other race in this staunchly conservative state. “They think they can turn Tennessee blue. But they’re not even gonna turn it purple because they are running into the red wall, and the red wall starts right here in Williamson County,” Blackburn declared.

Bredesen’s visit to Williamson County came just a few days after Blackburn’s speech.

While he made no mention of his likely opponent, his stop seemed to be a quiet, but pointed effort to suggest that “red wall” she talked about wasn’t so impenetrable.

The former governor sat at a packed table of about a dozen people right in the front window of Puckett’s Grocery, a popular local eatery barely two blocks from Blackburn’s district office in downtown Franklin. The group included some prominent Republicans like Aubrey Preston, a developer and philanthropist from Franklin who has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to GOP candidates, including Blackburn. But he was also part of a “Republicans for Bredesen” group during the former governor’s last campaign. Bredesen filmed his campaign announcement video at Preston’s home.

The conversation focused on local issues like land preservation, a hot topic in this rapidly developing part of middle Tennessee. Meanwhile, Bredesen’s first ad had just launched on local television and on cable networks including Fox News. It featured Bredesen talking up his record as someone who had “worked across party lines … with Democrats and with Republicans” — bipartisanship he emphasized when talking to voters here.

A fiscal conservative known for his moderate approach and willingness to work with Republicans, Bredesen won his 2006 reelection race by a landslide, capturing 70 percent of the vote in what even then was a strongly red state. And in that race, he did what no other candidate had done before or since: He carried all 95 counties in the state — including Williamson County, a particularly surprising victory since that’s where his GOP opponent was from. “Even Jesus would have had a hard time carrying 95 counties” in Tennessee, Rep. Jim Cooper, a “Blue Dog” (moderate) Democrat whose district includes Nashville, joked at the time. But that was 12 years ago.

Bredesen, left, waves to supporters as he declares victory over Republican candidate Jim Bryson as former Gov. Ned McWherter, right, and former Sen. Jim Sasser, second from right, look on at Loews Vanderbilt Hotel in Nashville on Nov. 7, 2006. (Photo: John Russell/AP)

While early polls in the Senate race suggest voters remember and still like him, Bredesen faces a political landscape that is dramatically different than when he last ran for office. Elected Democrats have gone nearly extinct. And though the state had a long tradition of electing moderate lawmakers from both parties, pragmatic politicians like Bredesen have mostly retired or been voted out.

It raises the question of whether a candidate, even one as widely admired as Bredesen, can persuade voters in an era of unprecedented political polarization to look beyond party labels on Election Day.

The race is sure to have broad national implications, beyond the battle for control of the Senate, in which Democrats need to win just two additional seats to regain a majority. Tennessee’s race will help answer whether the electorate still wants lawmakers who can govern in the middle.

Bredesen says his gut tells him there are people like him who are tired of what he describes as “the super-hyperpartisanship” that has torn the country apart and left Washington at a standstill. Even so, he admits to polling to make sure he wasn’t embarking on a “suicide mission.” The results were promising enough to persuade him to jump into the race, but they didn’t suggest an easy path to victory. He readily admits this will be a harder race than any he has run before.

Not only will Bredesen have to win over a wide swath of Republicans across the state, including voters who voted for and continue to back Trump, he will have to do so while also energizing and holding support among Democrats who may be more conservative than in other states but still want to see a candidate who is willing to take on Trump more aggressively.

Still, the 74-year-old ex-governor, who had long resisted entreaties from Democrats to take on other campaigns over the years, felt an almost moral obligation to make the race. “No one can fix Washington,” he said, “unless you try.”

Bredesen never saw Trump coming. But he was less surprised than most when the former reality television star rode a populist wave of support from rural and working class voters into the White House in 2016. He had been warning his own party about losing ground among that electorate for years.

As governor, Bredesen had sensed resentment building among voters who felt left behind by both political parties. When the economy went south in 2008, in what would later be known as the Great Recession, the unemployment rate rose as high as 20 percent in some parts of Tennessee.

Bredesen talks with Perry County residents in 2009 in Linden, Tenn. (Photo: Josh Anderson/AP)

At the time, Bredesen reached out to lawmakers in Washington from both parties as they looked for answers. “I thought there was nobody in that town who had any idea what it was like for these people lying in bed at night and just seeing all these things that they had hoped for, for themselves, for their families, just sort of disappearing because of some crazy Wall Street banker somewhere,” he said.

Nobody, Bredesen said, seemed to truly grasp “the fear and frustration” felt by working-class Americans who have never fully recovered even as much of the rest of the nation has rebounded back. He has been particularly critical of his own party, describing Democrats as “tone-deaf” to voters in small-town America, who tend to be more culturally conservative and who turned out for Trump in droves.

“The Democrats, nationally, have done a great job of alienating a lot of voters with this kind of holier-than-thou superiority about a certain type of voter,” Bredesen said. “What was Hillary [Clinton]’s term? Oh yes, deplorables.”

Long before the era of Trump, Bredesen had been sounding the alarm for Democrats on the party’s messaging. In the summer of 2007, he appeared before the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a group of party centrists who had gained influence during Bill Clinton’s presidency, where he said Dems desperately needed to find a way to reconnect with rural and blue-collar workers, especially in the South.

“If you asked me what the Republicans stand for, I could tell you in about 25 words: a traditional view of family, a central role for faith, low taxes, an assertive and combative view of American interests abroad,” Bredesen said at the time. He went on: “I challenge you to describe what the Democratic Party stands for in 25 words. You can’t do it. We’re just defining ourselves by what we’re not. We’re just criticizing the failure of others.”

History shows that the Democrats recaptured the White House in 2008, but the party continued to lose ground, and congressional representation, in states like Tennessee. Today, even the DLC no longer exists, having closed its doors in 2011.

Eleven years later, Bredesen offers a tight smile when asked about the speech and the suggestions he made to his party back then. “We didn’t do that, and Donald Trump is president,” he said matter-of-factly.

In a state where Trump won by 26 points, Bredesen is noticeably careful about how he talks about the president. He has repeatedly told reporters he does not want to be perceived as running against Trump — a line that eventually made it into a campaign ad in which the former governor, speaking to someone off camera, insists that he could find common ground with Trump and “separate the message from the messenger.”

“There’s a lot of things I don’t personally like about Donald Trump, but he’s the president of the United States, and if he has an idea and is pushing something that I think [is] good for the people of Tennessee, I’m going to be for it,” Bredesen declared in the campaign ad, a variation of what he often tells voters on the trail.

The ad did not mention any specific Trump policies, and Bredesen so far has not detailed areas of common ground between him and the president. He often pairs his Trump critiques to complaints about dysfunction in Washington in general.

“I don’t like the way this country and the way the media in this country has made everything about that person,” Bredesen said in an interview, referring to the president. “I think of Donald Trump more as a symptom than a first cause. And I think that symptom is that we as a party, … [and] a lot of Republicans too, have been tone-deaf to a lot of people who have been affected by globalization and technology and have got real concerns.”

A screengrab from Bredesen’s campaign ad.

Bredesen is quick to add that he doesn’t “have all the answers or solutions.” But in a subtle critique of Trump that is characteristic of his tone in the race, he added, “I think there are certainly better answers than demonizing every immigrant or starting trade wars or something like that.”

In some ways, Bredesen is an unlikely messenger for Red State Democrats. He’s not even from Tennessee. A Yankee transplant, he’s a native of Shortsville, N.Y., a small town 30 miles southeast of Rochester. While running for governor, he neutralized what could have been a liability in a state where rural voters are instinctively suspicious of outsiders by turning that detail of his biography into a plus. He explained to rural voters how he had grown up poor in a small town just like theirs. His father had left the family when he was a kid, so he and his mother, who worked as a bank teller, lived with his grandmother, who kept the family afloat by doing alterations and sewing.

But he went to Harvard (on a scholarship) and left rural New York for Boston in the mid-1960s. But Bredesen insists the mindset of a small town guy has shaped his years in public life. “While I live in an urban area now, I am basically a rural person,” he said.

Many of his relatives back in New York had voted for Trump and still support the president. “I don’t look at that as, ‘Well only racists or crazy people do that,’” he said. “I look at it as lots of reasonable people in this world are so estranged from what is happening in Washington that they want to see something different.”

A science whiz who was obsessed with space, Bredesen earned a degree in physics in 1967. After graduating he became a computer programmer, and after a brief stint in London moved to Nashville in 1975 with his wife, Andrea, a registered nurse who worked for a hospital management company. In 1980, working from a computer in his den, Bredesen founded HealthAmerica, a company that acquired and ran health management organizations. As he often tells voters, he went $10,000 into debt launching the company, but by the time he sold it in 1986, it was a $700 million a year company with 6,000 employees and traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The sale made Bredesen rich. A financial disclosure form filed last week as part of his Senate campaign offered a broad view of his personal wealth. The former governor reported he held investment assets ranging in value between $88.9 million and $358 million between January 2017 and February 2018. And he reported income from $3.3 million to $20.1 million during the same period — an overall net worth that would make him one of the richest members of Congress if elected.

His strength as a candidate is that he doesn’t come across as a rich guy or an elite businessman. While he tends to do more listening than talking — once describing himself as “the strong silent type” — he is calm and measured, without being stuffy, and speaks the language of everyday Tennesseans.

Bredesen frequently mentions the “Walmart test” he has applied throughout his own career and has encouraged others in his party to adopt. In it, he imagines how a voter in Walmart might react if he tried to sell them on a policy. “I just imagine myself stopping a couple in the aisle of a Walmart in Winchester, Tenn., or someplace like that, and explaining to them what I was trying to do, and why and so on,” he explained. “If I could see them nodding their heads, they don’t need to agree or disagree, but if they were saying they could at least understand what I was trying to do, I felt like maybe I was on the right track.”

The former governor has also presented himself as an avid sportsman and a strong supporter of gun rights. During his first bid for governor, Bredesen scored political points when he took a sporting group up on its offer to demonstrate his trap shooting skills alongside his Republican opponent, who didn’t show up. The National Rifle Association gave him high ratings — until he vetoed a bill allowing guns in bars. “Alcohol and guns just shouldn’t mix,” he said at the time. His veto was overridden by the Republican-led state legislature.

While he still mentions his support for the Second Amendment, and wore a hunting vest for the video in which he announced his candidacy, Bredesen has more recently endorsed tougher gun laws, including stronger background checks. But he has stopped short of saying he wants to ban the kind of assault rifle used in the Parkland, Fla., attack. In a race likely to attract heavy spending from outside groups, that may be enough to keep the NRA from an all-out attack on Bredesen.

Public polling in the Senate race has been scant so far — and mostly from partisan sources — but all suggest a tight contest between Bredesen and Blackburn among likely voters heading into November.

Perhaps the best indicator of the closeness of the race came in recent weeks when word leaked that some Republicans, both in and out of Tennessee, were pressing Corker to reconsider his decision to retire. They reportedly voiced concerns Blackburn may be too conservative to win independents or could alienate mainstream Republicans, who have broken with their party to back Bredesen in the past. In February, Colleen Conway-Welch, the widow of Ted Welch, a major Republican donor, made headlines when she hosted a fundraiser for Bredesen.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill last September after announcing his retirement at the conclusion of his term. (Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters)

Last month, Corker confirmed that he had considered reentering the race, but said he was sticking with retirement, though he declined to endorse Blackburn. He has said he should remain neutral ahead of the August primary. But some have wondered if he will endorse in the race at all because of his friendly relationship with Bredesen, who has known Corker, a former mayor of Chattanooga, for years.

The ex-governor says he spoke to Corker “numerous” times about the Senate race when he was still deciding whether he would run. He wanted to make sure Corker was really out of the race. And he quizzed him about what serving in the Senate is really like and whether he would enjoy it, telling reporters that Corker knows him well enough to gauge his “frustration” level. “We’ve been friends a long time,” Bredesen said.

There has some buzzing in GOP circles about the remote chance that Corker might endorse Bredesen over Blackburn — given he is more politically aligned with the centrist Democrat than the conservative Republican congresswoman. But a GOP consultant close to Corker, who declined to be named to speak more freely about the race, doubts that would happen. “More likely, he would just remain silent, but his silence would say everything to the Howard Baker wing of the party,” the consultant said, referring to the late Republican senator and former aide to Ronald Reagan who championed bipartisanism. Blackburn, he said, “will need real help there.”

In numbers that have been seized upon by Bredesen and his supporters, a recent Vanderbilt poll found that Tennessee voters tend to be more moderate than recent election results might suggest. According to the survey, about 62 percent of those polled said they regarded their fellow state residents as “conservative or very conservative.” But 48 percent said they viewed their own political leanings that way — a 14-point difference between perception and reality. Thirty-one percent of those surveyed described themselves as politically moderate.

Blackburn has one important ally: Trump, who has a 48 percent approval among Tennessee voters, according to the Vanderbilt poll — much higher than his average approval rating nationwide. But as in other parts of the country, Trump has lost ground in Tennessee. His approval was down 12 points compared to November 2016. In a potential warning sign for Blackburn and other Republicans here, the poll found just 35 percent surveyed felt Trump is changing Washington for the better, a 24-point drop since he was elected.

The same survey found little public thirst for some of the red meat issues that Trump championed during his first 14 months in office, including a crackdown on illegal immigration. Just 6 percent of those polled said the issue should be a top priority for Trump and Congress. Fifty-eight percent said illegal immigrants in the country should be allowed to stay and work, while 72 percent said they support allowing the children of illegal immigrants to be eligible for the in-state tuition rate at Tennessee colleges and universities — numbers that have increased since Trump was elected.

“It’s not clear to me that the right wing is still as strong in the state as some people think,” said John Geer, a Vanderbilt political scientist who helped oversee the poll. “They write letters, and they attend rallies, and they call their representative, but the state still has a strong pragmatic brand.”

Blackburn, flanked by Reps. Evan Jenkins, R-W.Va., left, and Mark Walker, R-N.C., leaves a House Republican Conference meeting at the Capitol Hill Club on March 8, 2017. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Even many Republicans are skeptical Blackburn can go after Bredesen as a flaming liberal Democrat who would fall in lockstep with GOP boogeyman like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. But she’s trying. Her campaign already regularly refers to the ex-governor as “the No. 1 recruit” of Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader from New York and leading Trump critic who played a role in convincing Bredesen to join the race. Republicans argue that whether Bredesen is a moderate or not, he would be a reliable vote for the Democratic agenda.

But Bredesen dismisses the critique he would just be another Democratic foot soldier. “People know me,” he said. “I’ve got a good record of not being that way.”

He points back to his time as governor, when he worked with Republicans to balance the state budget. During that era, he made what he still describes as the most heart-wrenching decision he ever made as governor — trimming 200,000 people from the rolls of TennCare, the state’s Medicaid system for the elderly and the poor. It was a politically treacherous choice, but one later credited as saving the program.

His experience with TennCare and trying to figure out health care in the state later made him a leading critic of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which he complained would put a huge fiscal strain on states. Though he reiterates that he does not support an outright repeal of Obamacare, Bredesen has said he is running in part to fix the law and plans to unveil a series of policies later this year aimed at bringing costs down and shoring up the plan — not unlike what he did with TennCare.

He knows that many lawmakers before him have headed to Washington with good intentions, only to get mired in the swamp. He frequently cites a Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, as lawmaker he admires for trying to rise above politics and make deals, as the kind of senator he would like to be, but he doesn’t have “delusions” that things will be fixed overnight.

But in reemerging at this place and time, Bredesen also admits he “sure wouldn’t mind” showing Democrats how to win again with rural and blue-collar voters who used to be the party’s base. Few listened to him 11 years ago, but maybe they will now.

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Martin Luther King’s unfinished legacy is visible in desperately poor Selma

Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., who preached nonviolent resistance to oppression and war, was shot to death in Memphis. He was 39 years old. He left behind a wife and three children and a nation still riven by the divisions he had devoted his life to healing. Yahoo News takes a look back at his life and his legacy in this special report. Jonathan Darman assesses King as a man not without flaws, but with a passion for justice and a conviction that grace can still be found here among us sinners on earth. Senior Editor Jerry Adler looks back on the fateful last year of King’s life, beginning with his electrifying, and controversial, Riverside Church address against the war in Vietnam. National Correspondent Holly Bailey goes back to Selma, Ala., whose poverty moved King to increasingly turn his focus to economic justice, and finds not much has changed in the years since. Reporter Michael Walsh looks at how King almost died in an attack a decade earlier, and how the knowledge of his mortality shaped his ministry and message.

SELMA, Ala. — Joanne Bland was just 11 years old in 1965 when she joined some 600 men and women in a march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge here. She was among those who were beaten when state troopers acting on orders from Gov. George Wallace charged the group, attacking them with cattle prods, billy clubs and tear gas.

She was already a veteran activist. Her grandmother had been taking her to civil rights meetings since she was 8, and her church, Brown Chapel AME, was the headquarters for activists fighting for social justice. Though she was not even out of middle school, Bland had already been arrested at least 13 times, taken to jail alongside adults and other children during mass protests over the town’s treatment of black residents.

Fifty-three years later, Bland vividly remembers the screams of terror she heard that day, the squeals of charging police horses, the blood spilling onto the bridge roadway. With her eyes stinging from tear gas, she stepped over people lying so still she thought they were dead. She remembers being knocked down and hitting her head on the pavement, feeling something wet on her face. She thought it was her older sister’s tears, but it was her sister’s blood, dripping from a gaping head wound.

“I thought they were going to kill us all,” Bland recalled.

The nightmarish images of Bloody Sunday, as that dreadful March afternoon came to be known, were broadcast around the world and proved to be a turning point in the fight for civil rights.

State troopers swing billy clubs to break up a civil rights voting march in Selma, Ala., March 7, 1965. John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (in the foreground) is being beaten by a state trooper. Lewis, a future U.S. Congressman sustained a fractured skull. ( Photo: AP)

Two weeks later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had skipped the Bloody Sunday march amid threats on his life, would lead roughly 3,200 people on a historic four-day march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, culminating in a rally of nearly 25,000 people in front of the state Capitol. That summer, with King at his side, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, a landmark bill that prohibited racial discrimination in voting, continuing the progress initiated by the Civil Rights Act a year earlier.

Back in Selma, Bland and others rejoiced, thrilled by what the new law could mean for them and their town. They imagined a more diverse political landscape for their city, which back then was almost equally divided between blacks and whites. They foresaw a city government that included black elected officials and believed other positive changes would follow, like more economic opportunity for African-Americans to own homes or start their own businesses. They finally saw their own path to the American dream. “We had just had this major victory,” Bland recalled. “We were so high.”

Five decades later, Bland, who is now 64, looks at her hometown and sees a city that once made history but has seemingly been left behind by it. As she sees it, “Selma is dying,” suffering a slow, agonizing decline that has been heartbreaking and frustrating for people like her who have fought so hard to keep it alive.

While Selma finally has the black representation that many here dreamt of in the 1960s — including a black mayor, a majority black city council and a black congresswoman — the town has struggled amid white flight, a sinking economy, high unemployment, rising crime and troubled schools.

A boarded-up storefront in downtown Selma, Ala., where roughly 41 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

The once bustling storefronts along Broad Street in downtown Selma, where she and fellow activists made history, are now mostly empty and still. The old department store is gone, many restaurants too. The city’s oldest neighborhoods, with their quaint old cottages and 19th-century mansions framed by towering live oak trees, are interspersed with burned-out houses and vacant lots full of tall weeds and trash.

Slideshow: The marchers are long gone from Selma, Ala. The poverty persists. >>>

On the streets near Bland’s neighborhood, countless homes are boarded up — but they aren’t necessarily empty. Here in a city that ranks as one of the most impoverished communities in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, many people are so poor that even homes that would be considered uninhabitable in other towns are still in use by families who have nowhere else to go.

Bland tries hard not to feel bitter when she looks around Selma, a town that spilled its own blood for the civil rights movement but has seemingly gotten little in return. Winning the right to vote wasn’t enough to spare Selma from the social and economic ills that have driven the community and others like it across small-town America into desperation. It’s a downturn largely driven by the loss of industry and jobs, but a struggle that has been felt more acutely in Selma and in other towns along the so-called Black Belt of the Deep South, which has long been one of the poorest regions in the nation and never felt the economic upswing when the rest of the country was booming.

“Selma gave so much to the world, and nothing has been given back,” Bland said. “We have the history, and that’s all.”

An abandoned home in Selma, Ala., where roughly 41 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

And part of that history is the unfulfilled promise of Dr. King, who turned his focus to the plight of small towns like Selma in the final months of his life. In February 1968, three years after Bloody Sunday, King returned to Selma, taking the pulpit at the Tabernacle Baptist Church on Broad Street, where he had pushed those who led the march for civil rights to embrace an even more ambitious “era of revolution.”

Ending segregation and earning the right to vote was just one part of the battle toward equality, King told the crowd. The next step was to take up the plight of America’s poor and reverse economic injustice that was keeping people from having a better life, including there in Selma. “Believe in your heart you are God’s children,” King told the congregation. “And if you are a child of God, you aren’t supposed to live in any shack.”

King called his revolution the Poor People’s Campaign, and he envisioned a movement of poor people from all races coming together to demand a living wage and better access to education and health care. He also wanted to pressure state and federal leaders into doing more to encourage economic development in rural America — not just by creating jobs but also by making sure communities had access to basic amenities like grocery stores and hospitals.

While King took his campaign to big cities like Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and Washington, the civil rights leader spent most of the final weeks of his life traveling across the rural South, where he believed his campaign would have the most impact. It was also where King still had a base of supporters, a crucial detail amid criticism by some in the civil rights movement over his decision to wade into more politically treacherous debates. In April 1967, he had come out against the Vietnam War — a move that was frowned upon by some of his allies, who thought it was diverting attention from the fight for civil rights. His campaign for economic justice was also viewed with suspicion by those who thought it was shining a light on a problem for which there was no easy solution.

Dr. Martin Luther King recruiting for his Poor People’s Campaign march on Washington D.C., at Batesville, Miss., March, 19, 1968. (Photo: Jack Thornell/AP)

King envisioned a rally in Washington that would rival the 1963 civil rights march on the nation’s capital, where he said poor people would camp until federal lawmakers did something about poverty. In the spring of 1968, he visited some of the poorest places in America to rally support for the march, making trips to Selma and remote rural parts of Alabama. He also traveled through the Mississippi Delta, making stops in places like Batesville, Greenwood and Marks — a tiny town in the heart of the state’s cotton belt where many families were so poor they could not afford to buy their children food to eat. In an earlier visit, in 1966, King had broken down in tears after he watched a teacher at a daycare center cut an apple into sections to feed her desperately hungry students, realizing it was all they had to eat.

As he planned his Poor People’s Campaign, King resolved that his march to Washington would begin in Marks, which was then the poorest town in the poorest county in the poorest state in the country. The marchers would travel to D.C. in a caravan of mule-drawn wagons, a potent symbol of the poor black farmers in the South. But King did not live to see it happen.

On April 4, 1968, he was killed by an assassin at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. While supporters ultimately did converge on Washington that June, occupying a settlement they called Resurrection City, the Poor People’s March and King’s dreams of transforming the lives of impoverished people, especially in the Deep South, largely faded away.

Civil rights leader Andrew Young (L) & others on balcony of Lorraine Motel pointing in direction of gun shots after assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who is lying at their feet. (Photo: Joseph Louw/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

It’s hard to know what ultimately would have happened with King’s war on poverty had he lived, or what he would make of the state of the nation today, where the divide between the rich and the poor is even more extreme, and where the places he tried to champion face even more dire conditions than they did 50 years ago.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in Selma, where the town is smaller, more segregated and poorer than it was during King’s day. Its population of roughly 28,000 in 1960 was down to less than 19,000 in 2016, according to U.S. Census estimates. While the town was roughly split between blacks and whites during the civil rights era, Selma is now about 80 percent black. That divide is more extreme in the public schools, where 99 percent of the student population is black.

A man stands outside Walmart, one of the few thriving businesses and major employers, in Selma, Ala. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

The average income in 2016 was $23,283, roughly half of Alabama’s median household income. More than 41 percent of the town lives below the poverty level, according to the U.S. Census, more than three times the national average and one of the highest rates of poverty in the country. Among children under 18, the percentage living in poverty is nearly 60 percent.

In the past 50 years, the town has lost hundreds of jobs, as textile and other manufacturing plants have closed and the agricultural sector has declined. One of the biggest blows came in 1977, when nearby Craig Air Force Base, a pilot training facility and airport that once had a population of nearly 5,000 and contributed millions to the local economy, closed its doors.

Like other small towns, Selma has suffered under state and federal spending cuts, including in agriculture, education and health care. It has been forced to try to do more with less. And with much of the population living below the poverty level, local tax dollars haven’t been there to help the city invest in and improve conditions that might help it attract new industry.

Selma, Ala. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

“Black Selmians have fought so hard to try and create economic opportunities, to make the most of the vote, to really improve things for themselves, but they keep fighting with a dwindling pool of resources. It just gets smaller and smaller and smaller,” said Karlyn Forner, a Duke University historian specializing in civil rights who wrote a book about the city’s plight, “Why the Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma.” “The economic abandonment has been so deep for so long, it’s just an impossible task to be able to solve it [without outside help].”

Outside of downtown, area shopping centers are full of vacancies, including the old J.C. Penney, which closed four years ago. Many buildings sit in empty decay — monuments to a more prosperous time. One of the biggest employers, besides an International Paper plant on the east side of town, is the local Walmart.

While the unemployment rate in Selma has dropped to 8 percent — down from 13 percent in 2015 — few credit the number to people actually getting jobs. They believe many people have simply given up looking.

“To see our town go from the way it was to the way it is now, it’s ridiculous. Boarded-up houses, no jobs. I don’t care what you say, poverty is a form of violence, and people are hurting,” Bland said. “You tell a child that he needs to get a job, that he shouldn’t be waiting for a handout. But there are no jobs to be had. How do you justify that?”

Mannequins in a store window in downtown Selma, Ala., where many storefronts are empty (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

But there is a new push to call attention to the struggle of Selma and the towns that King once championed. On a recent Friday night around the corner from where the Bloody Sunday march began 53 years ago, a few hundred people packed the pews of the First Baptist Church in Selma as a group of activists plotted the revival of the Poor People’s Campaign to try to force the nation to address the tricky question of poverty, just as King had so many decades ago.

The group was led by Dr. William J. Barber II, a black minister and civil rights leader from North Carolina, and Dr. Liz Theoharis, a Presbyterian minister originally from Milwaukee who has spent years working with the poor. Also onstage were other well- known civil rights leaders, including Rainbow Coalition founder Jesse Jackson. Jackson had worked on the original Poor People’s Campaign and was in Memphis with King when he was assassinated.

Collectively, they spoke of initiating a “moral revival” in the nation, with an agenda that includes living wages, health care, criminal justice reform and clean water and air. The campaign also criticizes the nation’s “war economy,” in which the U.S. spends more money on military action overseas than rebuilding communities at home — an issue that even Donald Trump flicked at during his 2016 bid for the White House but has largely ignored as president.

The Rev. William J. Barber leads a rally for the Poor People’s Campaign at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Ala. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

Earlier in the day, Barber and Theoharis had toured some of the poorest areas around Selma, including a rural community in neighboring Lowndes County not far from the historic route of the 1965 voting rights march. They visited homes occupied by the poorest of the poor in the region, where many homes lack sewage systems, leading raw waste to openly flow into yards and often back into the drinking water. That has led to an outbreak of E. coli and hookworm, an intestinal parasite and disease of extreme poverty that is more typically found in developing areas of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

A United Nations official visiting the region last December as part of a forthcoming study on extreme poverty told a local reporter that conditions in Lowndes County and other parts of Alabama’s Black Belt were among the worst he had ever seen in the developed world.

“And this plays out in many communities across the country, but especially the rural South,” Theoharis said later. “This kind of disease and a lack of public health and desperate poverty connected to it… And this is America.”

A home in Selma, Ala., where roughly 41 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

Two days after the meeting in the First Baptist Church, Barber and Theoharis gathered a couple of blocks away on the steps of the Brown Chapel AME, where hundreds of people had converged to mark the 53rd anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march. An annual event, the Selma Jubiliee, as it is known, includes the re-creation of the march from the church to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. President Barack Obama participated in the march in 2015, and this year the group included nearly 100 members of Congress. Among them were Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who is often rumored as a possible future presidential candidate, and Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, the storied civil rights leader who was beaten on Bloody Sunday.

This year, organizers for the new Poor People’s Campaign were determined to use the annual march to call attention to poverty and other problems facing Selma that have long been ignored by the politicians who descend on the city every year to mark the town’s civil rights history. They fanned out with big yellow signs and handed out fliers, which advertised a planned 40 days of activism beginning in May and leading to a June 23 march in Washington, D.C., modeled after the original Poor People’s Campaign.

Participants in a re-creation of the Selma freedom march, which this year centered around voting rights and poverty (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

But in a series of speeches by civil rights leaders and politicians before the march, the issue of poverty was all but ignored — until Barber took the microphone. He recounted the extreme poverty he had seen among local residents in recent days and criticized politicians who seemed unwilling to even try to tackle the subject, even as they came to march on Selma’s hallowed ground.

“What would Dr. King think?” he said.

In the crowd that day was Joanne Bland, who spends most of her days giving tours to outsiders who come to Selma to learn about the civil rights history that happened here. She loads the visitors up in a van and takes them to the Brown Chapel AME and then drives them to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and then to the other side, where the marchers were first attacked.

But Bland also shows outsiders “the ugly” parts of Selma, the crumbling factories east of downtown that ceased operations long ago, the surrounding neighborhoods with burned-out houses and vacant lots where people deal drugs in the middle of the day and where there has been open warfare among local gangs. She wants them to see what has become of her city.

Participants in a re-creation of the Selma freedom march, which this year centered around voting rights and poverty (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

“I’m not ashamed to show it to them, ’cause sometimes you have to play on the guilt,” she said. “You have to make people feel guilty. We gave you so much. Now look at us. Help us.”

The reactions are often the same, she said — how Selma shouldn’t be like this, how a city that played such an important role in civil rights should be lit up and thriving, how a city that paved the way for politicians like Obama and Harris and Cory Booker shouldn’t be so forlorn. But then they leave, and nothing happens.

In some ways, Bland followed a similar path. After graduating from high school, she moved to New York for college and later joined the Army and was stationed in Germany. Returning to the U.S. in 1989, it was her intention to live in New York — “the big city,” she says — but a visit back to Selma changed her mind. She was troubled by the decline of her hometown and felt drawn to try to do something.

In addition to local activism, she helped found the National Voting Rights Museum and organized the first Selma Jubilee to re-create and commemorate the Bloody Sunday march, building on the city’s historical tourism. But the city continued its long decline.

She still has hope of things turning around. And like Dr. King she has a dream — that one of the many visitors she talks to returns to Selma, buys a house or starts business and does something for the community. Then their friends would follow, and a city could be reborn. That’s why she keeps telling the story of Selma again and again, working day and night to call attention to what she calls a “blight on America.”

“To me social movements are like jigsaw puzzles — everybody has a piece,” she said. “My piece is teaching young people where we’ve been as a nation so they can improve upon what we already did.” But for Selma to survive, she said, “it’s going to take so much more than just me talking about it.”

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The late great photojournalist Chris Hondros, in his own words and images

You hear Chris Hondros before you ever see him, as he calmly takes a call as though it were any other day in the office. And for the late Getty Images photographer, it was. The battlefield was where Hondros worked, where his photographs came to sharply define some of the bloodiest conflicts of the last 15 years, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would also be where he ultimately lost his life, killed in a 2011 mortar attack along with fellow photojournalist Tim Hetherington while covering the civil war in Libya six years ago this week.

But on this day in 2003, Hondros was in Liberia, answering his phone as he walked down the street with young militia members who were barely high school age but were now on the frontlines of a deadly civil war. In the chaotic footage that opens “Hondros,” a documentary about the photojournalist’s life and work which opens in select theaters this week and begins streaming online March 6, the photographer takes the phone call off camera, reassuring the person on the other end that all is well — even as his words are nearly drowned out by rapid bursts of machine-gun fire and blasts in the not-too-far distance.

“Things are fine,” Hondros casually tells the caller, his voice the very definition of ease. “Give me a call back in about half an hour.”

Chris Hondros, center, in Liberia in 2003. (Photo courtesy of Nic Bothma)

It’s only then that the viewer sees Hondros come into frame, camera in hand, calmly documenting the chaotic scene in the Liberian capital of Monrovia where militia members were squaring off against rebel forces determined to overthrow then Liberian President Charles Johnson. Even as other journalists began to turn back amid fear of escalating violence, Hondros continued on toward a bridge where some of the fiercest fighting was underway, crouching as bullets whizzed through the air. Within minutes, he took one of his best known photographs — an image of a young militia commander leaping ecstatically into the air, drunk on the glory of war, after firing off a rocket-propelled grenade toward rebel forces. The picture, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, is considered one of the most iconic images of modern war photography.

It was the story behind that photograph that was the genesis of “Hondros.” Greg Campbell, a journalist and filmmaker and author of the book “Blood Diamonds,” had grown up with Hondros in North Carolina and was the photographer’s best friend. While mourning his death, Campbell was surprised to receive a Facebook message from Joseph Duo, the young Liberian immortalized in Hondros’s photo, who told him of the larger role the photographer had played in his life.

Joseph Duo, a Liberian militia commander loyal to the government exults after firing a rocket-propelled grenade at rebel forces, July 20, 2003, in Monrovia, Liberia. (Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Slideshow: Chris Hondros’s life and pictures highlighted in documentary, ‘Hondros’ >>>

In 2005, during a return trip to Liberia, Hondros finally met Duo, learning his name for the first time and his backstory. Duo, then 28, had dropped out of school in the 10th grade to go to war. Living in poverty with his wife and three kids, he told Hondros he was trying to go back to school in hopes of pursuing a better life, but it wasn’t easy for someone his age.

To Duo’s surprise, the photographer helped him enroll in school and paid the tuition, hoping that would allow the man to choose his own fate. The two subsequently kept in touch over the years, as Hondros reviewed Duo’s report cards and encouraged him to persevere. When Duo graduated from high school and enrolled in college classes in computing and criminal justice, Hondros continued to pick up some of the costs —though he told almost no one, including Campbell.

“I always knew that Chris made friends easily and kept them close at hand and really kind of cultivated his relationships but … I had no idea the actual scale of the impact that he had on people,” Campbell said.

Inspired to tell the story of his friend’s legacy and generosity, Campbell launched a Kickstarter campaign to finance a film about Hondros’s most famous photos and his personal and professional impact on his subjects and others who came to know him. The project found important backers in actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Jake Gyllenhaal, who eventually served as producers. Four years later, the result was “Hondros,” which premiered last year at the Tribeca Film Festival one day after the sixth anniversary of the photographer’s death.

Exclusive clip from ‘HONDROS’

The filmmakers interviewed Samar Hassan, an Iraqi teenager who was photographed by Hondros in January 2005 moments after U.S. soldiers opened fire on her family’s car, killing her parents. The image of Hassan, then only 5, screaming and covered in blood, was one of the most powerful images of the Iraq war and one of the first to truly capture the horror of the conflict for the country’s civilian population.

Yet the most powerful footage in the film is of Hondros at work, captured in war zones via found footage from other journalists who were on the scene. He moves quickly and with precision, always watching and looking for the best angle, the most dramatic framing.

The film shows Hondros in action as he takes some of his most famous images, including in Iraq and Libya, where the footage includes shots of the photographer working right up to the final moments before his death. Campbell and his fellow filmmakers had put out an open call for any imagery of Hondros at work, resulting in “hours and hours” of footage that had to be drastically edited. As the footage plays, it is spliced with still images pulled from the Getty Images archive of the photos Hondros was taking at the time.

Samar Hassan, 5, screams after her parents were killed by U.S. soldiers, Jan. 18, 2005, in Tal Afar, Iraq.  (Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

“Probably one of the most challenging things was to find that footage and kind of turn over every rock, but it was also one of the most fulfilling,” Campbell said. “One of the most pleasant surprises was that you could actually see him at work in his environment and literally in some cases with the video camera over his shoulder as he’s taking photographs that came to be pretty iconic and very well-known from the conflicts that he covered.”

At times, Hondros narrates his own story, speaking about his work and the importance of photojournalism through snippets of various television interviews conducted before his death. At one point, an interviewer asks Hondros to respond to a claim that war photographers are “the craziest” of all journalists.

“The problem with war photography is that there’s absolutely no way to do it from a distance,” Hondros replied. “You have to be close. You can’t do it from your hotel. You can’t do it from across the street, from across the bridge. You have to be there. There’s really no substitute for that. So you have to figure out ways to get into the midst of things, no matter what’s happening. And you have to suspend your reason sometimes to do that.”

Chris Hondros in southern Beirut, Aug. 21, 2006. (Photo: Getty Images)

Campbell’s documentary comes at a difficult moment for journalism, especially for photojournalism. As print magazines and newspapers have scaled back or shut down, the ubiquity of smartphones has turned practically every passerby into a photographer, and professional photojournalists are finding it harder to make a living. And the wars they cover are growing increasingly brutal and dangerous.

While Campbell’s primary goal was to introduce viewers to his best friend, who was only 41 when he died, he also hopes “Hondros” will remind people of the importance of photojournalists, especially in covering combat in places like Iraq and Libya.

“Everybody with a phone on the planet can take a photo of what’s happening, but in order to take a photo that helps you understand it, it requires the skills and talents of a photojournalist,” he said. “Especially in this day and age where the very fabric of truth is being questioned from the highest levels … there’s no replacement for having experienced, skilled, well-trained people who know what they’re doing from a journalism perspective going into these environments, who are dedicating themselves and putting themselves at risk to come away with the truth or as close of an approximation as we can get to it.”

U.S. Army soldiers in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, 2009. (Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Throughout the film, it’s hard not to wonder what Hondros, who was just weeks away from getting married when he was killed, would be doing today. Many of the places he documented, including Iraq, are still being ravaged by deadly conflict. Campbell said it’s hard to tell where his friend’s life would have taken him, though he believes he would be on the frontlines somewhere, determined to show the horrors of war.

“One of his friends once said that his favorite photo of Chris’s was the one that Chris never got to take next,” Campbell said. “It’s interesting to kind of think about the possibility of what those photos might have been and the stories he would have been telling us.”

Chris Hondros in Cairo, 2011. (Photo courtesy of Scout Tufankjian)

Cover thumbnail image courtesy of Scout Tufankjian.

[h-bailey]

In wake of church shootings, pastors and worshipers arm themselves to shoot back

The First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the site of last November’s deadly mass shooting, has turned its sanctuary into a memorial for the 26 victims. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

SANTA ANNA, Texas — When Kevin Roman thinks about what happened at that tiny church in Sutherland Springs last November, he considers the clock: seven minutes.

That’s how long it took for a masked gunman to spray hundreds of bullets in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church during the Sunday morning service on Nov. 5, killing half the congregation of around 50 and wounding 20 others. Seven minutes is all it took to enact the worst mass shooting in Texas history and the worst ever at a church in the United States. Just seven minutes was all it took to rip out the heart of a tiny community, to inflict the kind of pain on families that will never heal.

Roman lives hundreds of miles away, in a tiny unincorporated West Texas town called Valera. Like Sutherland Springs, Valera is a blip on the map, a one-stoplight village of roughly 80 people where everyone knows everyone else. There’s a post office, a barbecue restaurant and the Valera Baptist Church, where Roman has been pastor for the last three years. The congregation of 30 or so meets Sundays in the small white chapel a few blocks off state highway 67 in heavily rural Coleman County that appears to have more cows than cops.

Last year, when the barbecue restaurant was robbed, it took the county sheriff almost 30 minutes to respond. Roman thought of the robbery on that fateful November morning, as he heard early reports of the massacre in Sutherland Springs. He considered the fate of his own church, smaller but equally remote. What would they do if a crazed gunman suddenly showed up on their doorstep? Would there be anyone to protect them? Could they protect themselves?

Like Sutherland Springs, Valera, Texas, is a one-stoplight town. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

“Sutherland Springs was a punch in the gut because, out in the middle of nowhere, you forget about danger,” Roman said.

His congregants also watched the news and began to think about their safety. Some of the Sunday regulars began bringing their guns to church, including a woman who kept one in her handbag. Nobody talked about it. It just happened. They started locking the church door during services, and a man positioned himself in the last pew to keep watch. It still didn’t feel like enough.

Roman resolved to come up with a plan for how to keep his church safe in the event of the unthinkable. “Even if nothing happens, I didn’t want to be that pastor who wasn’t prepared,” Roman said.

On a recent Wednesday night, Roman found himself 15 miles down the road on one of the front pews at the First Baptist Church in nearby Santa Anna. He was one of about 50 small-town pastors and church congregants from around the region attending a $25-per-person seminar on church security taught by Jimmy Meeks, a retired police officer-turned-minister who travels the country advocating for churches to be better prepared for violent attacks like the one in Sutherland Springs. Unlike other church security experts, he makes little money on the ministry. The tickets usually cover his travel costs and that’s it.

Meeks calls his mission the Sheepdog Seminars, and in recent months, he’s been on the road almost nonstop, traveling to churches throughout Texas and as far away as Nevada, Florida, Kentucky and Ohio, called upon by pastors to spread awareness that not even the sacred house of God is immune from bloodshed in an era of seemingly endless mass shootings.

Jimmy Meeks of Sheepdog Seminars delivers a church security seminar at the First Baptist Church in Santa Anna, Texas (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

“What happened in Sutherland Springs, as horrible as that was, it was not unique,” Meeks said as he prepared to take the pulpit in Santa Anna. “Violence happens all the time in churches or on faith-based property, but for some reason, people in the church still operate as though this could never happen to them. (They say) ‘No, Lord, not at my church.’ And I say, ‘Don’t you remember Charleston? Don’t you remember Colorado Springs? Or Fort Worth? Don’t you remember this town or the other?’ People need to wake up.”

For almost three hours, Meeks, dressed in a Western-style shirt, faded jeans and cowboy boots, marched up and down the aisle of the small sanctuary in Santa Anna, alternating between the calm voice of the cop he used to be in the suburbs of Fort Worth, where he still lives, and a fire-and-brimstone preacher passionately trying to stir the church body out of what he describes as “complacency.” Invoking a litany of past church attacks, often with his voice choked and tears in his eyes, Meeks again and again warned that what happened in Sutherland Springs could happen anywhere, in any church, big or small.

Although recent headlines might suggest otherwise, it is still safe to go to church on Sunday morning. Unlike school shootings, the FBI does not keep a specific tally of acts of violence at faith-based institutions, so the research is largely left to outside experts. But given the millions of institutions of faith in the country, the ratio of deadly crime is, on average, small.

Since 1999, there have been around 1,700 “deadly force” incidents at houses of worship, including mosques and synagogues, according to Carl Chinn, a church security expert in Colorado Springs, Colo. Even though there are few incidents on average, church shootings are often high profile. According to Chinn’s data, roughly 1,000 of those deadly force incidents included the use of a gun, and in nearly 500 cases, someone was killed.

Experts say that what’s happening at churches is not necessarily a sign of growing anger at religion, but rather a sign that houses of worship are not immune from the rash of deadly shootings that seem to be growing in number in recent years. People like Meeks argue that churches need to be prepared and aware of what is happening in  the society around them.

“You need to be ready!” Meeks shouted. Citing the Old Testament story of David versus Goliath, he rejected the interpretation that the young warrior was an underdog who had simply overcome his enemy with the help of the Lord. David, he said, had “trained” to face his enemy — just as churches must now train and prepare for potential attacks.

“David was conscious of the threats,” Meeks declared. “Are you conscious of the threats?”

For churches, the more difficult question now may not simply be whether they are aware or even preparing for the threats. Just as Meeks’s schedule is crammed with dozens of seminars in coming months, consultants and other organizations that specialize in church security have been overwhelmed with training requests from congregations all over the country in the aftermath of Sutherland Springs as shaken churches grapple with the fear that  an attacker could target their place of worship. Some waiting lists are reportedly more than a year long, already scheduled well into 2019.

Valera Baptist Church, in remote West Texas, reconsidered its security plan after the Sutherland Springs shooting. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

In Texas, the question of security has ignited a separate debate over how far a church should go in trying to protect the flock, especially small-town churches that can’t afford to hire police or professional security guards. Many law enforcement officials and security experts say it is a risk for churches to rely on volunteer security or gun-toting congregants who may not have the proper training to interpret a genuine threat or how to respond. But Texas officials, including state Attorney General Ken Paxton, have said what happened in Sutherland Springs is an argument for more armed parishioners since they may be a church’s only line of defense.

“We need people in churches … at least arming some of the parishioners or the congregation so that they can respond if something like this, when something like this happens again,” Paxton told Fox News on Nov. 5, hours after the Sutherland Springs shooting.

But even in gun-friendly Texas, where an open-carry law has been on the books since 2016, some churches have been reluctant to allow congregants to carry their weapons during service, even concealed. The churches are fearful of the tension the presence of a gun might cause or the message it might send in an environment that is supposed to be welcoming to outsiders. Even now, some churches around the state say they believe they should rely on their faith in God to protect them from potential attacks, not guns.

“There is a fundamental question about who is the church and what are we about. Are we going to be gun-carrying and put trust in redemptive violence?” Kyle Childress, the pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, told the Austin American-Statesman in December. “I don’t believe the way of Jesus Christ teaches that.”

Before the Sutherland Springs shooting, several major church groups in Texas, including leaders of the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, had advised their membership to ban weapons from services. Citing the Catholic doctrine that the real presence of Jesus Christ exists inside the sanctuary, dioceses in major cities, including Dallas, San Antonio and Houston, banned guns. But in the aftermath of Sutherland Springs, church leaders of various denominations have faced pressure to reconsider their positions on weapons.

In November, just a day after the shooting in South Texas, the Diocese of Dallas said it would not formally lift its ban on the open or concealed carry of firearms inside its churches, but it advised its parishes to consider removing outdoor signs that advertised the prohibition on guns out of fear it would make the churches more vulnerable to attack. But the move effectively allowed the carry of weapons, since state law requires any business banning guns to install a public sign formally stating that policy.

A family stands near 26 crosses set up in a baseball field a few blocks from the site of the shooting during a memorial service  in Sutherland Springs, Texas. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

Outside of Texas, the Sutherland Springs attack sparked new calls for gun control measures — the same response that happened just weeks earlier after the Oct. 1 mass shooting in Las Vegas and other deadly events before that. But in the Lone Star state, the opposite happened, especially in the small towns around Sutherland Springs. Worried residents increasingly saw firearms as their only reliable line of protection in an area where law enforcement isn’t always around the corner.

Gun stores in Wilson County, where Sutherland Springs is located, have reported an uptick in the sale of firearms and applications for concealed weapons since November, including from local pastors looking to protect their flock. It’s not unheard of for a pastor to carry a gun in the pulpit. Frank Pomeroy, the head pastor at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, told reporters after the shooting that he regularly carried his weapon to church. But on that Sunday morning when his church was attacked, Pomeroy was in Oklahoma City taking a class to be a licensed gun instructor for a youth class on pistols. His daughter Annabelle, just 14, was killed in the shooting. The pastor has admitted to agonizing over whether he could have stopped the attack.

“In a way, I think that if I were there I could have done more,” Pomeroy told the New York Times after the shooting. “But who is to say?”

Church leaders in the heavily rural area had operated on a mostly “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to carrying firearms during services even before the Nov. 3 shooting and now say they have noticed more guns on Sunday mornings. “I honestly welcome it,” said a pastor from Floresville, Texas, a  town neighboring Sutherland Springs. The pastor declined to be identified by name because he did not want his church to be a target. “People are nervous, but they aren’t afraid of guns around here,” he said. “They are afraid of someone barging in and shooting them.”

In Sutherland Springs, Devin Kelley, the gunman, was ultimately stopped when he left the church and came under fire from Stephen Willeford, a church neighbor who had grabbed his own weapon when he heard gunfire across the street. Although he was wearing ballistic armor, Kelley was shot twice, in the leg and torso, causing him to drop his gun — an AR-556 assault rifle — and flee. He later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after Willeford and another man, Johnnie Langendorff, pursued him in a high-speed chase into the countryside.

Vice President Mike Pence speaks Wednesday outside the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the site of the Nov. 5, 2017, mass shooting. He was joined by Johnnie Langendorff, fourth from right, and Sherri and Frank Pomeroy, far right, the pastors of the church. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

Police have speculated that Willeford may have stopped Kelley from killing more people. The gunman was believed to have targeted the church in a dispute with his estranged wife’s mother, but she wasn’t in church that morning. Inside Kelley’s vehicle, police found two more guns and additional ammunition. Investigators have hinted he may have had more targets, although they have offered no other details.

In the aftermath of the shooting, some churchgoers in the region appointed themselves to be unofficial guardians of their church, taking inspiration from Willeford’s gun battle with Kelley. At the same time, some churches, especially smaller congregations in rural areas, have sought to set up security teams made up of volunteers — something they couldn’t legally do until recently.

In September, just two months before the Sutherland Springs attack, a new state law went into effect that allowed churches to form security teams without having the training, licensing, insurance and background checks usually required of security guards in the state. Before that, churches who were caught relying on armed volunteers that did not meet state licensing requirement faced fines up to $10,000 and potential jail time — though there’s no record of any organization being charged. Backers of the new law, including Meeks, argued that the old regulations unfairly penalized small churches that couldn’t afford  to hire outside security or formally license members of the congregation, leaving them vulnerable.

But opponents of the law have raised concern about the potential danger caused by untrained volunteers who don’t know how to properly use their weapons or identify and respond to a potential threat in the heat of the moment. They say it’s no different from having an unlicensed vigilante sitting in the church pew and have expressed concern about accidents — which have happened in recent weeks.

Just days after the shooting in Sutherland Springs, a 81-year-old man was accidentally shot in the hand and his wife was grazed in the stomach at a church in Tellico Plains, Tenn., after he pulled out his weapon during a church discussion on bringing firearms to church.

That unease over potential accidents and guns in the hands of untrained congregants has only increased in the rush to protect churches in the aftermath of Sutherland Springs.

“Having Bubba there with a gun is not necessarily the best idea,” said Chuck Chadwick, a longtime church security expert and founder of the National Organization of Church Security and Safety Management. He has been training churches on how to protect themselves for more than a decade through Gatekeepers Security Services, a Dallas-area private security firm he and his family operate.

William Chadwick, an instructor at Gatekeepers Security Services, demonstrates defense tactics against potential church attackers during a defense class in Pilot Point, Texas. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

The program, which costs $800, has trained and certified more than 350 parishioners, church staffers and even pastors as state-licensed personal protection officers. It’s based on a curriculum that closely mirrors requirements for private security officers, including training in handguns and hand-to-hand combat. Participants are trained in church-specific scenarios, such as distinguishing potential troublemakers from those who may be showing signs of emotional distress and are seeking help.

“Churches have a unique dilemma because nobody wants to shut the doors to people who need help,” Chadwick said. “But you also have to have people who can detect the difference between whether someone is going up for prayer or whether they are going up to attack the pastor. You don’t always know, and you have to be prepared to act. … That comes from training.”

On a recent weekend, the Gatekeepers class in a suburb outside Dallas included six men from a small church in San Marcos, Texas, a town about 45 minutes north of Sutherland Springs. The group, which included the pastor, had signed up for training after the Nov. 5 shooting.

All the men were gun owners, skilled marksmen who regularly hunted and spent time at the range. But in training the week before, the group had spent time practicing their skills in a simulator designed to give them an idea of what handling a gun might be like in an active-shooter situation. The experience had been overwhelming. “You imagine it’s going to be stressful and chaotic, but it’s so much more intense than you imagine,” one of the men said. “Hopefully, we never experience anything like that in person.”

Congregants from Texas-area churches participate in a class on security and defense tactics offered by Gatekeepers Security Services in Pilot Point, Texas. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

That morning, the men were going over potential defense tactics in what would be their final hours of training before testing. They practiced punches and kicks on a rubber dummy at the center of the room, moves designed to neutralize a potential assailant without having to use a gun. The training emphasizes that using a gun in the sanctuary should always be the last resort.

Chadwick’s son, William, a licensed bodyguard who runs security for a prominent Dallas pastor, had spent part of the class standing at a dry-erase board, scratching x’s and o’s on the board like a football coach trying to lay out the best possible plays. A circle represented the church sanctuary, and inside the circle were even-smaller circles — barrier rings that led to the pulpit in the center. He talked about setting up cameras and where to position security and staff, and walked the men through how to de-escalate potentially bad situations.

“Where’s your first line of defense?” he asked. He drew an arrow just outside the circle. “You always need someone here, keeping on eye on the parking lot.”

It was the parking lot outside the church in Sutherland Springs where Kelley had first attracted notice. The gunman had barely parked his SUV, leaving it in the street, when, according to witnesses at a gas station across the street, he jumped out and began firing at the exterior walls of the church before he headed inside the sanctuary.

A diagram of security scenarios to combat a potential active shooter at a church is shown on a whiteboard during a class on defense tactics offered by Gatekeepers Security Services in Pilot Point, Texas. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

William Chadwick, a serious but affable man, grows angry just thinking about it. Along with his dad, who was running church security when he was just a kid, he had spent most of his adult life trying to spread the word to churches to be more mindful of potential threats. What happened in Sutherland Springs just seemed senseless to him and preventable.

“There was no one there to confront him, no one there to stop him,” he said. “I remember people were saying how heartbroken they were, and I was, too. But I was so furious. I was actually angry. There was not a single person there, no gatekeeper, no one to stand in that threshold and tell him no. … When are people going to get serious?”

In Santa Anna, Meeks’s presentation was far more informal. The retired police officer outlined some of the same suggestions emphasized in the Gatekeeper training, including locking certain doors and where to position church staff.

“Get in the parking lot. They are all coming from the parking lot. Nobody’s coming on an airplane. They’re going to pull up in the car in the parking lot, get out and start,” Meeks said. “If you are there to deal with them, there’s a good chance they won’t get inside. You cannot let the shootout take place in the sanctuary, are you hearing me?”

Congregants from Texas-area churches participate in a class on security and defense tactics offered by Gatekeepers Security Services in Pilot Point, Texas. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

Meeks repeatedly advised the congregants to study mental illness, accusing churches of dancing around a subject that is a more realistic threat than an ISIS-inspired soldier storming the sanctuary. “You need to know what schizophrenia is. You need to know what bipolar means. You need to understand aggression. You got people in your church that got all these diseases,” the former cop said. “Study these things. Why is the church so scared of everything? You ought to be on the phone next week and get somebody out here from mental health services and say, ‘Educate us.’ … Can I get an amen on that?”

“Amen!” a man shouted.

Meeks was blunt that his seminar did not teach the congregants everything they needed to know. “You ain’t ready,” he said. He advised them to enroll in a class like Gatekeepers, if they could afford it. But he acknowledged that many small churches simply didn’t have the money. So he repeatedly advised them to go back to their churches and train and practice security scenarios repeatedly.

Jimmy Meeks, a retired Texas police officer, runs Sheepdog Seminars, which focuses on church security. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

“If your church safety team is not trained, I don’t even know that you should have one. You’re nothing but a liability to the whole church,” Meeks said. “Because when he shows up to kill, it is going to be sheer chaos and hell like you never dreamed possible. You better start training, you better be practicing.”

Before he ended the service, Meeks took up a collection, asking for donations to buy a new bulletproof vest for a local police officer who sat in the back. He had recognized instantly that the one the cop was wearing was so old it could barely withstand a conventional gunshot, much less fire from the kind of military-style assault rifles used in recent mass shootings. Then Meeks sent his audience off with a prayer — though he kept his eyes open and his head up, one of the tips he had offered his audience.

“Never EVER close your eyes,” he said.

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'What will it change?' In rural Iowa, there are better things to watch than a State of the Union

Jack Marlowe, left, and Jerry Farrell watch a Maquoketa High School girls basketball game Jan. 30 in Maquoketa, Iowa. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

MAQUOKETA, Iowa—The scuffle broke out around the same time Donald Trump began his ceremonial walk through the U.S. House chamber to deliver his first State of the Union address as president. Two girls jockeying for possession of the ball before the halftime buzzer had collided and fallen to the ground in a blur of tangled limbs and thrashing pony tails before the ref blew a whistle and signaled a pair of free throws for the hometown Maquoketa Cardinals.

In the stands, there were whoops and fist bumps from the crowd of 200 or so, a pretty good turnout for girls basketball on frigid Tuesday night here deep in the heart of Iowa’s rural Mississippi River Valley, roughly 888 miles away from the nation’s capital. The Cardinals girls varsity team was struggling to keep pace with their visiting rivals, the Mount Vernon Mustangs, in hopes of turning around a middling season.

As the clock ticked down to halftime, some in the crowd jumped to their feet, yelling encouragement to the girls on the court. There were students and parents and others with a personal connection to the game. But many in the stands were there just to be there—locals more interested in cheering on the hometown team than watching Trump’s State of the Union address.

Jerry Farrell, left, and Jack Marlowe attended a Maquoketa High School girls basketball game in Iowa instead of watching Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

“You ask me what I would rather be doing, watching Trump or sitting here, and this is where I would say every time,” said Jack Marlowe, a 81-year-old retired sports writer for the local paper who spent nearly 40 years chronicling high school sports here in Jackson County.

Seated in the stands right behind the basket, he cheered as a Cardinals player sunk in two points. “It’s not just the game, though I love it, and I love these kids,” Marlowe said. “But why would I watch? What in that speech will change anything?”

Entering the game with a record of 10 wins and 9 losses, the Cardinals seemed out of the race for the conference league championship. But in the team’s plight to finish well, to keep pace with their rivals, some here saw something emblematic of the larger problems faced by this small town, which like the team, has fought to stay in the game.

Here in Jackson County, residents have watched their factories close and job prospects fade. Though the local unemployment rate is roughly 4 percent, slightly higher than the state total but lower than the national average, that number doesn’t account for those who have simply given up looking for work, as many here are well aware. The per capita income–$25,865 in 2017—was below both the state and national averages. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 13 percent of the population was living below poverty level, also higher than average.

A store closing sign on Main Street in Maquoketa, Iowa. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

When Donald Trump spoke of running to represent the “forgotten people” and “forgotten towns” of the country during his bid for the presidency, the message resonated with people here and throughout rural Iowa. In a sweep not seen in any other state in the country, Trump flipped 31 counties in Iowa in 2016 on the way to his 10-point victory here over Hillary Clinton. More than a dozen of those counties were strongly blue before Trump came along—including Jackson County, where Barack Obama won by 17 points in 2012. But in a victory that was echoed in rural counties all over the Mississippi Valley, extending up from Iowa into bordering Minnesota and Wisconsin, Trump reversed the trend, winning Jackson County by 19 points.

But a year into the Trump presidency, many here question whether the real estate mogul will deliver the jobs and economic progress he promised to small town America. Though some in Jackson County still wave the Trump flag—including one resident who has literally erected a Trump flag on property along state highway 64, one of the main roads into town—some voters who backed the real estate mogul in his unlikely path to the presidency seemed disappointed by his first year in office.

Speaking during the first quarter of the game, Janie, a registered Democrat who backed Trump (she declined to give her last name) said she had believed the former reality television star was the “lesser of two evils” compared to Clinton, whom she saw as a politician who was “more of the same.” But she said she has been disappointed by the “endless chaos” of the Trump presidency and his inability to cut through Washington’s gridlock. “Not all of that is his fault,” she said. “But I hoped he would be about to do something.”

A Trump flag flies on a property along state highway 64 in Maquoketa, Iowa. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

Many here declined to talk about Trump—including one woman who sighed and replied, “What did he do now?” Some said they saw the game as a place of retreat from the political turmoil. “I see it on television, hear it on the radio,” one man said. “You just can’t escape, though I try very hard to.”

Jerry Ferrell, a retired farmer, described himself as the Cardinals’ number one fan who would never miss a home game. But he also admitted he had no desire to watch Trump’s speech in full and would rather catch the highlights after the game. “I watch and listen to him, and I just feel worried,” he said. It wasn’t the lack of job creation or his failure to deliver on promises to small towns like this. He expressed concern about Trump’s aggressive rhetoric towards other countries and the risk of war, after decades of being caught up in overseas conflicts including in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It really worries me, the potential of loss of life,” he said.

By the fourth quarter, the Cardinals were down significantly, hurt by their own offensive missteps and an aggressive Mustang defense. But the clock wound down, the silence of the crowd on the home team side was suddenly interrupted by the sound of Trump’s voice. Cathy Pickup, whose 16-year-old daughter Carolyn was on the court, had pulled up the speech on her phone. Shushed by another basketball fan, she stood and took her phone to the far end of the gym, holding the phone’s speaker up to her ear with one hand while she cheered on her daughter with the other.

“I couldn’t control myself,” Pickup admitted.

A self-described “hardcore Democrat,” Pickup said Trump’s rhetoric and behavior is hard to ignore, no matter how much she tries. “In all honesty, I wanted to see if he was going to mess up and what he was going to say,” she said. “You can’t look away. …When he goes off the cuff, it’s a trainwreck, and it scares me, for my family and for my country. The fights he picks… You never know what he’s going to say or who he’s going to say it to and what the consequences are going to be.”

At the final buzzer, the Cardinals lost, 54 to 40. The players on both sides shook hands and gave high fives. In the stands, spectators stood and applauded. As he walked out the door into the high school lobby, past the glass cases of trophies from championship years past, toward the frigid Iowa night, Marlowe smiled.

“People say it’s just a game, but the truth is, Trump could probably learn a few things from these girls about team work and working together,” he said. “Congress, too.”

Cathy Pickup watches Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on her phone during a Maquoketa High School girls basketball game Jan. 30 in Maquoketa, Iowa. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

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The ones that got away: Jonesboro's survivors — and the shooters — recall a moment of horror

It was five years ago that a young man invaded Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and shot and killed 20 young children and six staff members, a tragedy that indelibly scarred that small city and lives on in the collective national memory. But school shootings didn’t begin, or end, with Sandy Hook. Yahoo News looks at the aftermath of four of these tragedies and the lives they changed. <[LINK TO LISA] In this story, we examine how 20 years on, Jonesboro, Ark., is still traumatized by an attack carried out by two middle-school boys — and how survivors deal with the knowledge that the killers are now grown men and free from prison. In other stories we look at the lessons from Sandy Hook that may have helped save lives at a California school just last month and at how the parents of a girl killed in Newtown are coping with their loss.<<[LINKS]

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JONESBORO, Ark. — Sometimes the feeling of anguish comes out of nowhere. Maybe it’s triggered by a certain shift in the wind or when the temperature is warm but not too warm. Sometimes it’s seeing something on television that suddenly brings it all back, a memory of a horrible day that happened long ago but is as vivid as if it were yesterday.

For Lynette Thetford, it is the warmth of the early spring that has often proved to be most challenging, and for nearly two decades she has steeled herself waiting for those difficult days, bracing for the pain and memories that inevitably come rushing back no matter how much she prays to God for strength and healing, no matter how far she’s come.

Over the years, Thetford has gotten more adept at keeping it together, reliant on her strong Christian faith and protected by a cocoon of family, friends and colleagues who make sure she feels loved and safe. But last February, the darkness enveloped her when she wasn’t expecting it — an unusually mild day in the dead of the winter. It was the kind of day most people live for, especially the kids at Nettleton Junior High, where she works in the library. But in the early afternoon, Thetford felt her heart racing and her emotions plummeting. She struggled to breathe and tried not to cry. Soon she was over “the cliff,” as she put it, back in the emotional abyss.

Lynette Thetford at her home in Jonesboro, Ark. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

“I wasn’t ready for it,” Thetford recalled, her voice a little shaky. “When it gets to the conditions of the air, when the weather was like it was that day — I know it’s been, like, 19 years, but I still have that relapse.”

Thetford can’t help but think of another warm day, March 24, 1998, when she had walked out into the yard behind the nearby Westside Middle School, where she taught sixth-grade social studies. A fire alarm had gone off just after lunch, disrupting the beginning of fifth period. At first it wasn’t clear if it was a drill or a prank. It would turn out to be something far worse. As the students and teachers exited into the back schoolyard, gunfire rang out. From a makeshift sniper’s nest in woods behind the building, two students, Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, fired dozens of shots at their teachers and peers, using guns stolen that morning from Golden’s grandfather.

In a matter of minutes, the boys killed five people — four sixth-grade girls and a teacher — and injured 10 others, including Thetford, who was shot in the lower abdomen as she tried to steer those around her to safety. The bullet ripped through her intestines and severely injured the nerves that control her legs, causing her to fall forward to the ground unable to move. She was dragged to safety and kept from bleeding to death by colleagues who put pressure on her wound, but it took her months to learn how to walk again.

A view of the wooded area behind Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., where Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden shot and killed five people in 1998. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

Before Columbine and Sandy Hook, before Sutherland Springs and Las Vegas and Orlando and San Bernardino and Charleston and Aurora and Virginia Tech and all the other mass shootings that have stunned and numbed the country over the past two decades, it was Jonesboro in the headlines, a small town that few outside of Arkansas had ever heard of. It was Jonesboro that horrified the nation and stripped away the innocence of teachers and students who had never imagined such evil descending on them, their school and their community.

  ***

What makes the Jonesboro case unique is that the shooters survived their rampage and have had the opportunity to explain but simply haven’t. Unlike other killers, such as Adam Lanza in Newtown and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Columbine, Johnson and Golden didn’t turn their guns on themselves, which makes them a rarity among school shooters. The boys were apprehended as they ran away, toward a van packed with camping supplies and food for an apparent escape.

Each boy faced five counts of murder, which likely would have merited life in prison or even the death penalty had they been adults. But under Arkansas state law at the time, the two could only be charged as juveniles and held in jail only until they were 18, their records sealed. A little maneuvering allowed federal officials to add on three more years for weapons charges, keeping them in prison until they were 21.

In 2005, Johnson was released from prison after serving seven years, though he soon ran afoul of the law and briefly went back. In 2007, Golden was released and changed his name to Drew Grant — a detail uncovered only when he filed for a concealed weapons permit a year later. Arkansas State Police identified him through his fingerprints and denied the application. It wasn’t because of his criminal record — technically he didn’t have one, because the murder charges had been expunged. They rejected him because they said he wasn’t truthful on his application. Asked for his residential history, he had omitted the address of the correctional facility where he’d been locked up for years.

Family members of victims of the Jonesboro, Ark., school shooting embrace following the convictions of Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden. (Photo: Jeff Mitchell/Reuters)

Because they were juveniles, their case remained largely shrouded in secrecy, and according to those close to the case, the boys declined to talk to investigators or offer any insight into what led to their deadly ambush. But they were forced to testify in a wrongful death civil case brought by the families and a hard-charging local attorney named Bobby McDaniel who was determined to seek answers from them.

In August 2017, hours of videotaped depositions of Johnson and Golden were released after a judge slapped the killers with a $150 million civil judgment — money the families do not expect to see. But they wanted the world to watch and learn from Jonesboro in hopes that their tragedy could produce lessons for other communities. According to McDaniel, they wanted do what they could to stop the tragedy from recurring and to offer something more enduring in the hopes that Jonesboro would be more than just another statistic.

“The real important aspect of this case is the why was it done, what did we learn from it, and how can we implement what we’ve learned?” McDaniel said.

In the testimony, which dates back nearly a decade, the public can hear and see the boys speaking for the first time about their crimes. The videos still offer no direct answer for the question “why?” The shooters, by then young men, largely blame each other for whose idea it was to ambush their school, as they did when they were first apprehended. Johnson claims Golden made him do it, and Golden testified that Johnson threatened to kill his family if he didn’t participate — dueling testimony that often rings hollow.

But Johnson seems more forthcoming than Golden about what led up to the shooting and what pushed him over the edge.

“I remember feeling like I was trapped, like no one understood me,” Johnson testified in 2007. “I felt cornered. I felt like I didn’t have anywhere to go, nothing to do. I thought my life, you know, was at an end. … I had a lot of people who were against me then.”

Andrew Golden, left, and Mitchell Johnson during videotaped depositions.

Johnson’s testimony included several dispassionate apologies to his victims. But echoing the little boy who felt the world was against him, he also sounds like a young man with his back against the wall, complaining of not being able to hold down a job because everybody knows who he is and what he did. “Society is cruel, you know, especially towards a murderer,” Johnson testified. “It’s just something I live with every day.”

Even in a churchgoing community where many believe in forgiving others as God has forgiven them, some survivors found Johnson’s comments chilling and hard to believe. The fact that he and Golden are free today disturbs and frightens many survivors. They worry about running into one or both and fret about the mindset of someone who may someday feel once again that the world is against him.

Though public records suggest both men now live out of state — Golden in Missouri and Johnson in Texas — some family members of the victims and survivors declined to speak about what happened in Jonesboro and their experience in the nearly two decades since, in part because they expressed fear of retaliation from the shooters. “Who knows what’s going on with them?” one said.

Nearly 20 years later, Thetford, who is 61, still sometimes limps, especially when she’s tired. And some days, in spite of her strong faith in God and her belief that she must have been spared for a reason, Thetford can’t help but feel tired. Tired of the guilt that never quite goes away and the shredded emotions that come with living through something that, back then, was not nearly as common as it feels today.

“I find myself glued to [the coverage],” said Karen Curtner, who was the principal at Westside during the shooting. “My husband’s like, ‘Why are you watching that? Don’t watch that.’ But what I find is … and I don’t know why I do this, but I try to figure out, I guess, some type of common denominator among all of these. That’s what I try to do. I analyze it, and I think, ‘What would cause a person to want to do that?’”

Karen Curtner was the principal at Westside Middle School at the time of the shooting. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

She’s not alone. Many Jonesboro survivors say they have obsessed over the details of shootings in other cities, looking at those tragedies as they still try to understand their own. Johnson and Golden have never explained exactly why they did what they did — a detail that has made finding a sense of closure much harder, if closure for something like this even really exists.

  ***

When it happened, the shooting ranked as one of the worst in the country’s history and the worst ever attack on a middle school, according to the FBI. Jonesboro, situated about 130 miles northeast of Little Rock, was inundated by media from all over the world, overwhelming the small city of some 50,000.

Located on the rural outskirts of town, amid rolling wooded hills that open up into flat farm fields of cotton and wheat, Westside suddenly found its parking lot crammed with satellite trucks. Producers from syndicated talk shows tried to sneak into the hospital rooms of survivors; reporters staked out funerals.

The idea that two baby-faced kids whose lives had barely begun had chosen to commit such a coldblooded and adult crime was a shocking and unimaginable concept — until a little over a year later, when Harris and Klebold, high school seniors, shot and killed 13 people and injured more than 20 others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

After Columbine, Jonesboro slowly began to fade from the national spotlight. The white ribbons people tied on tree trunks in memory of the dead have long ago frayed and vanished. At Westside, where the school looks largely the same as it did 20 years ago, there is a stone bench out front carved with the date — “Mar. 24 1998” — and a small memorial in the shape of a sundial in a park area behind the building, near the sidewalks that were once stained with the blood of the fallen.

Engraved on the sundial are the victims’ names: Natalie Brooks, 12; Paige Herring, 12; Stephanie Johnson, 12; Britthney Varner, 11; and Shannon Wright, 32.

A sundial installed in honor of four children and a teacher killed in the 1998 school shooting. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

“Most of the kids who are here now have no idea what happened, what any of this means. They weren’t even alive,” a Westside teacher said on a recent Thursday afternoon after school had let out. “And to be honest, we don’t talk about it much either.”

That’s because the community has tried to move on. As at Columbine and Sandy Hook, the anniversary of the shooting was formally marked the first year or two. There was a ceremony around the flagpole in front of Westside to mark the five-year mark. Since then, the date has largely passed without mention, except for informal gatherings of family members and survivors — a decision encouraged by people who believed that moving forward was ultimately the best kind of healing for a town that had suffered so much.

But it is a tragedy that has quietly endured in ways that are not always so obvious — through the unimaginable loss still felt by parents and families of the children who were killed, the trauma and guilt that still plague the teachers, students and other survivors and other pain that has rippled in unusual ways through the community.

Everybody has a story — the responding paramedics and hospital staffers who were later diagnosed with PTSD, the counselors who tended to the victims who later needed counselors of their own to cope with what they’d heard, the teachers who walked away from the classroom forever because they couldn’t get past a sense of fear or guilt that they had been unable to protect their students from a threat that was not even near the top of the list of bad things that people here believed could happen.

“When we thought of safety back then, it was things like making sure that the playground was equipped with safety features,” said Curtner, the former Westside principal, who is now an assistant superintendent at Nettleton Public Schools, also in Jonesboro. “We never thought about people hurting other people. I guess I was naive.”

Corey Hallet, a third grader at the Westside Middle School, is escorted by his mother, Holly, and Elvis Poe of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, to take part in a program to help students cope with the fatal shootings, March 25, 1998. (Photo: John Kuntz/Reuters)

After the shooting, the parents of at least one child killed split up. Others took their surviving children and left town, trying to forge a new start in a new home and at a new school — though for some, it caused more anguish being in a community where there was no one to talk to about what they had been through. Some turned to alcohol or drugs to ease the pain. Others touched by the shooting have suffered serious health problems or died years before they were expected to, developments other survivors attribute to the enormous stress of what they went through. The children who lived through the attack are now adults with their own kids, and though many have been able to deal with the aftermath of that day much better than the grownups, some have told reporters about the fear they have felt in sending their own kids off to school, a place that no longer seems safe.

Many of the families and survivors no longer talk to reporters. Along with concerns about Johnson and Golden, some say the subject is too painful to talk about after all these years. Many are still angry at the media about how they were treated in the aftermath of the shooting. And others say they don’t want to be accused of trying to seek some kind of attention for themselves when some in the community have constantly urged them to “move on.”

After initially refusing to speak to the media or anyone else about what she had been through, in part because of survivor guilt, Thetford eventually saw the questions as a gift from God to lift the pain and burden she felt. She began speaking to reporters and at churches. After Columbine, she traveled to Littleton, where she met with survivors and others who were on the scene, including police officers, trying to ease their pain by sharing her own. As more acts of violence happened, she reached out to other victims of mass shootings, trying to offer comfort.

“I’ve written places and offered to come because when you hear about something like that, the first thing you want to do is put your arms around them and hug them,” she said. “That’s the first thing that comes to my mind is I just want to hold them and tell them it won’t ever be OK, but it’ll get better.”

  ***

Thetford knows she was one of the lucky ones, which comes with guilt all its own. She lived. After the hospital, she came home to her husband and her kids. And every year, it is she who takes a ski vacation with her family, who gets to hold her grandkids close and see them grow up. It is she who will finally retire this year, after nearly four decades as an educator, having refused to let one terrible day take away the job she had dreamt of doing since she was a little girl. “I count my blessings every day because I’ve been so fortunate,” Thetford said. But her life since has been anything but easy.

Emergency personnel rush an unidentified student to an ambulance at Westside Middle School. (Photo: Curt Hodges/Jonesboro Sun)

She still remembers the little details of that of that day, playing them over again and again in her mind. It was the second day back in class after spring break. Her husband had hit a deer with her old Monte Carlo earlier that morning, leaving a huge dent in the front. It was her dream car, and as she drove to work, she was upset. As she said hello to the secretaries in the front office, one asked her how she was doing. “The day can’t get much worse,” she replied.

Today, Thetford cringes at the remark. “I have not said that since,” she said.

Before class, she ran into her friend Shannon Wright, a sixth-grade English teacher who was one of the youngest on staff. Married with a 2-year-old son, she was showing off pictures of her family’s trip to Disney World the week before. “They were so bright and beautiful,” Thetford recalled.

When the fire alarm began blaring shortly after 12:30 p.m., a student told Thetford she thought she had seen Golden pull the alarm and run out the back door. Thetford was annoyed at the disruption. But she decided to do the drill anyway. Grabbing her grade book, she began walking her students down the hall toward the back exit. Along the way, she thought about Golden, who was one of her students. Thetford knew him and his parents well. His older sister had been in the first class she’d ever taught, and she’d also taught his brother, who was the same age as her son. Andrew, she thought, “is gonna be in so much trouble for pulling that fire alarm.”

Thetford was the first person out the back door into the warm sunshine. She began going down her class list, checking off the kids’ names. Around her, the yard was getting crowded with other students who had evacuated. That’s when she heard the first pops. It sounded like firecrackers, and she thought it was an ill-advised attempt to frighten the kids, perhaps to encourage them to take emergency drills more seriously. “What in the world is administration thinking?” Thetford thought.

Lynette Thetford at her home in Jonesboro, Ark. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

Suddenly, Thetford began seeing students collapse around her, and she realized they were being shot at. Dropping her grade book, she began to frantically wave her arms. “Get down! Get down!” she screamed at those around her. Within seconds, she felt a “whoosh,” followed by horrific pain. She fell prone to the ground. On the sidewalk, she saw a little girl to her left. She had been shot in the head. “I knew she was dead,” Thetford said. Before she could come to grips with what she’d seen, she felt hands grabbing her and picking her up, taking her out of the line of fire.

Curtner came out the front door of the school. As she walked around the side of the building, she saw kids running in terror and others who were hurt and bleeding on the ground, including Thetford. She heard a series of pops.

For a second, she panicked. The school had practiced for fires, tornadoes and natural disasters. But they had never prepared for anything like this. They had no lockdown plan or security guard to protect them. “Schools were the safest place to be,” she said. “You never thought of needing anything like that. It was unheard of.”

The security doors leading back into the school were locked, a fire protection feature triggered by the alarm, so the principal began herding panicked kids and teachers toward the gym next door. Bullets were still flying, until suddenly the shooting just stopped. With little time to think, Curtner ran back to the front entrance, which was unlocked, and began racing through the classrooms grabbing giant buckets and supplies, including medical kits that they had prepared months earlier when scientists suggested a giant earthquake might hit the middle of the country.

She had no idea the crucial role those earthquake kits would play in another kind of disaster. Police and ambulances took more than 15 minutes to arrive at the school on the edge of town, and the kits were credited with saving the lives of several of the severely injured.

An emergency worker carries a young girl from an ambulance outside Westside Middle School, March 24, 1998. (Photo: Leigh Daughtridge/Commercial Appeal/ZUMApress.com)

As ambulances arrived to transport the wounded, Curtner knew there were kids that didn’t make it. Nothing in her life had prepared her for what she saw as she ran around trying to assist. She tries not to think about it, but the images linger like a bad dream.

From the moment she began training to be a teacher, it had been drilled into her that she was responsible for keeping the kids in her care safe. If she could have stopped the bullets, she would have, but she hadn’t, and for that, she felt like a failure. But the pain and depression she would ultimately feel would only come much later. At that moment, she had the burden of taking on what needed to be done, of being the pillar of strength her kids and teachers needed.

Only when the police stopped Curtner and asked her to look through a list of students to mark who had been absent that day did she begin to wonder who had attacked her school. She wondered if it was a disgruntled parent or some mentally ill lunatic. But she checked off who had been out of school that day, a list that included Johnson and Golden.

“We’ve got these two in custody out in the car,” the officer told her, pointing to the boys’ names.

“For what?” she said.

Curtner didn’t get it, even when the officer told her Johnson and Golden had been found with the guns. And when it hit her, she couldn’t believe it. Later, people would ask her if the boys had been troublemakers, if there had been signs of instability or hints that they would become killers. Johnson had been in trouble, but nothing out of the ordinary for a boy his age. Even now, she remembers how unfailingly polite he was — always “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am.” And she’d never even seen Golden in the office. “Not one time,” she said. She could not believe them capable of murder.

She knew their parents. The Goldens, who worked in the post office, had been involved with the school and seemed like good people. She was still thinking about it when Dennis Golden, Andrew’s father, rushed through the front door looking for his son.

Dennis and Pat Golden, parents of Andrew Golden, leaving the Craighead County Sheriff’s Dept., March 25, 1998. (Photo: Mike Wintroath/AP)

“He thought he was coming to pick his child up. He’s like, ‘I can’t find my kid. Where’s my kid?’” Curtner recalled. “I remember them taking him in my office, and I remember the look on his face.”

Like Curtner, he was stunned.

  ***

The next few months were, according to Curtner, “a blur.” In a decision that perhaps wouldn’t be made today, classes resumed at Westside that Friday, three days after the shooting. The school administration, acting on the advice of counselors, had made the call in the belief that getting the kids back on a schedule would allow them to find “normalcy.”

The school had brought in high-pressure hoses to wash the blood away and tried to patch up bullet holes that had pierced the school building and the gym. They would ultimately bulldoze some of the trees where Golden and Johnson had set up their sniper’s nest and install fences designed to keep the grounds more secure, but that wouldn’t happen until later. Inside, the fire alarm had been temporarily deactivated, amid fears that a false alarm might send school into panic.

Some of the students didn’t return in those early days, but many did, even though that Friday also happened to be the day that many of the funerals were held. In every classroom, the state had assigned a counselor to encourage the kids to talk about their feelings, though many struggled to, or preferred talking only to teachers who, like them, had been there and could relate to what they were going through.

Nothing was normal. A police officer had been assigned to the building 24 hours a day, guarding what had become a macabre tourist attraction. Every day, there was more mail to open in what was an unbelievable outpouring of support. There were letters, teddy bears, school supplies and boxes of other gifts meant to help the school feel important. In classes, kids were assigned to write thank-you cards. It was just a struggle to get through each day.

“We just survived, pretty much,” Curtner said.

Top, pall bearers carry the casket of Westside Middle School student Paige Ann Herring. Bottom, left to right, the teacher and four children who died in the Jonesboro school shooting: Shannon Wright, Brittany Varner, Paige Ann Herring, Natalie Brooks and Stephanie Johnson. (Photos: Rogelio Solis/AP; Family handouts via Reuters)

The following school year was trickier. Some of the teachers didn’t return — though after months of rehabilitation, Thetford did. She was happy to be back, happy to see her kids, but like every part of the journey after the shooting, it wasn’t easy. Many days, she spent time after school talking to Curtner and the other teachers in what became informal therapy sessions where they talked about the emotions and fears.

There were days when some of the staff couldn’t get out of bed because they were so depressed or full of anxiety. A few teachers admitted to thoughts of suicide. Thetford struggled with feeling guilty that she had survived while her friend Shannon Wright, who had taken two bullets while trying to shield her students, had died. And at one of her lowest points, Thetford told her mother, “I don’t understand why Shannon got to die, and I stayed here.” She was diagnosed with severe clinical depression.

That fall, the school was required to hold a fire drill. Some students and teachers decided to stay home rather than risk flashbacks. But Thetford knew she had to face her fears. Before the bell went off, she recalled how the new superintendent of the school district had approached her and grabbed her hand. “Mrs. Thetford, we’ll protect you,” he said.

“I thought, ‘No, he won’t. Nobody can protect you from things like that,’” she recalled.

While every day was a struggle, Thetford was determined to stick it out with her students. Instead of sixth-grade social studies, she was teaching the seventh graders, to allow her more contact with those who had been in school that day. She loved teaching history, she loved the school and she believed things would get easier. “To get me out of here, you’d have to blast me out,” she told a colleague.

But one day, she was pulling a clip of World War I for a lesson. She wanted to teach the kids about trench warfare, but she couldn’t bear to watch the film clip, because of the violence. How could she do her job without a visual? “I started crying,” she said. “That’s when I knew I’d have to get out of social studies.”

A police officer stands at the perimeter of the crime scene. (Photo: Leigh Daughtridge/Commercial Appeal/zumapress.com)

When the seventh-grade class that year moved on to the high school, Thetford took a job as a reading teacher at Nettleton and eventually went back to school to become a librarian. For her part, Curtner stayed with the kids, becoming principal of Westside High School, a job she kept until that class graduated. In a move that surprised her colleagues, she took a job as principal at the local high school for troubled youths. Explaining the move, she says she felt she could “make a difference.” But she also admits she felt she needed a change, and to deal with kids who had disciplinary issues felt easier than staying at Westside.

“I left that burden there,” she said. Moving to another school “took my mind off of it, and it was a saving thing for me.”

  ***

Frustrated by the secrecy of the juvenile court proceedings and the indication that the two boys who killed their kids would serve just a few years in prison, the victims’ families approached a prominent lawyer named Bobby McDaniel shortly after the shooting to ask if he thought there was any other avenue of justice.

Regarded as one of the best civil litigators in the state,

had made national news just two years earlier as the lawyer for Susan McDougal, one of Bill Clinton’s partners in the Whitewater land venture. McDaniel had forced the sitting president to sit for a deposition in a fraud case related to the failed real estate deal.

For him, taking the case was personal. Jonesboro was his hometown, and like everyone else he was horrified by what had happened. Nobody was in it for the money — except to prevent the boys from perhaps someday selling their stories or profiting off the crime. While the Golden family reportedly did pay an undisclosed amount of money to some of the victims’ families, what McDaniel and the parents really wanted was information. How could they stop something like this from ever happening to anyone again?

Attorney Bobby McDaniel at his office in Jonesboro, Ark., Nov. 30, 2017. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

In 1998, McDaniel filed a wrongful death suit — naming Johnson and Golden as defendants, along with Sporting Goods Properties, the manufacturer of a Remington 742 rifle that was used by Johnson in the attack, arguing the gun was a risk because it didn’t have a trigger lock. While the gun company was later dropped from the case, in part because the guns were stolen, the attorney still said they had been successful, pointing to the increased presence of trigger locks that gun makers began to add to weapons amid worries of liability after what happened in Jonesboro.

“Every time you go into a gun store, every gun on a rack has a trigger lock on it. That was not the case when we filed this lawsuit,” McDaniel said.

But it took years to realize the other part of the case: trying to understand what made Johnson and Golden attack their school that day. It was nearly two years before he got to question the boys for the first time back in 2000 — testimony that was limited because they were still juveniles and Golden had filed an appeal to overturn his conviction, claiming he had been insane at the time of the shooting.

Then McDaniel had to wait again until the boys were out of prison. Because they had been held as juveniles, there was no reporting on their exact release or where they had gone. It took nearly a decade after the shooting to track them down and complete the depositions. It was another nine years before they were made public this past August — more than 19 years after the shooting.

“It was a long, long process, but as I told the families, and I maintained, the consequences of this case are gonna last lifetimes,” McDaniel said. “So what if we have to wait seven years, 10 years, 20 years. I will not abandon ship just because it’s gonna take a long time.”

The videos feel extraordinary — not so much for the answers they provide, but rather because they exist at all in a case that for years was marked by silence. It is rare to see killers speaking under oath about their crimes, even if some of the testimony offered by Johnson and Golden is hard to believe, including claims made by both that they had shot at the sky, not at people.

There are four separate videos of close to nine hours of testimony. Two of Johnson, one taken in 2000, when he was 15; and another in 2007, when he was 22 and soon to be on his way back to jail after being pulled over in a van with marijuana and an unregistered gun. (Johnson said it was a Christmas gift from a friend worried about his safety.) And two of Golden, one taken in 2000, when he was 13; and another in 2008, when he was 22. By then, Golden had changed his name to Drew Grant in an attempt to “start a new life,” he explained. McDaniel tracked him down after his failed attempt to get a concealed weapons license.

Mitchell Johnson, center, taking a break from trial in Fayetteville, Ark., Jan. 29, 2008. Johnson, then 23, faced one count of possessing of a firearm while being a user or being addicted to a controlled substance. (Photo: Beth Hall/AP)

In the 2008 video, Golden appears nervous and uneasy. He talks about going to live with his sister in Missouri to change his name and start over and how he once stayed with a pastor of his parents to stay under the radar after his release. He had been taking classes at Arkansas State in Jonesboro under his new name and had been working odd jobs and relying heavily on his parents, who had bought him a truck and were paying for most of his expenses. He had gotten a single tattoo since he had left jail: a cross with the words “Roman 3:23.” When McDaniel asked which Bible verse it was, Golden mumbled, “For all who have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

Golden speaks of remorse, but never says he is sorry. He testified that he had never apologized or reached out to his victims on the advice of his lawyers and because he “didn’t want to stir anything up.” He delivers pages of testimony about his skills as an expert marksman, the awards he won as a child. But when asked about the shooting at Westside, he repeatedly testified he shot into the air or aimed at the gym, away from people, even though ballistics show bullets from his gun hit Thetford and killed Brooks, among others. It sparked a tense exchange with McDaniel, who, off camera, sounds increasingly incredulous.

Golden: “I didn’t ever intentionally shoot anyone.”

McDaniel: “That’s a lie, and you know it, isn’t it?”

Golden: “No, sir. I never aimed at anyone.”

McDaniel: “Oh, it’s purely coincidental that five people lay dead with bullets through their head and their hearts by pure accident, right?”

Golden: “I never intended to. I never shot at anybody. I didn’t.”

McDaniel: “Do you know what perjury is?”

But in a haunting moment, Johnson was asked during his 2007 deposition if he has read about the shootings that have come after Jonesboro, including the attack at Columbine, and what advice he might have to stop future killers like him. After a moment, he responded at length, speaking somewhat dispassionately about the warning signs to look for.

“If a person is normally active, a person is doing well in school and not having problems, and he just all the sudden clamps up, don’t want to talk, getting in trouble; obviously that’s a warning sign,” Johnson said. “Deviant behavior, running with the wrong crowd … that’s a bad thing. It is. People who are physically violent and don’t get counseling for it and don’t talk about it, don’t talk about their problems period, stuff boils over, you know.”

Mitchell Johnson, left, and Andrew Golden in undated yearbook photos.

In the closest answer to a reason given by either one of the boys, Johnson added, “I think that was the main reason why. If there was any reason, that was the main reason why I decided to help Andrew do what he done, do we what done. I felt like I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I didn’t have anyone to open up to. I didn’t know who I could trust.”

According to public records, Johnson lives in Houston. Golden got married last year and lives outside Cape Girardeau, Mo. Neither one has ever personally apologized to their victims.

“I am incapable of expressing to you the stress, anxiety, frustration, and anger that these parents have that somebody who burglarizes a home, for example, or sells crack cocaine can get 40 years in prison, and these guys were out walking the street in virtually no time,” McDaniel said. “Just like we can’t lock up the drug problem — they tried that and it hadn’t worked — and locking these kids up for 100 years would be great at least in the eyes of the parents, but I don’t know the solution. There’s no answer that will remove their hurt, anger and frustration.”

  ***

On that warm day in February earlier this year, when Lynette Thetford felt all the pain and memories coming back, she excused herself from her desk at the Nettleton Junior High library and took a 15-minute drive back to Westside, down that winding road she has traveled so often over the past 20 years. She’s come here alone often or visited some of the students she lost at the cemetery up the street. But this time, she brought one of her assistants, a close friend who has seen her through dark times just like this one. She wanted to tell her the story of what happened that day.

As much as it hurts and will hurt, talking about it helps, crying about it helps. That’s what she tells other survivors of mass shootings and families who have lost loved ones. If Thetford had learned anything, it’s that keeping it all inside, bottled up, just doesn’t work.

When they got to the school, they walked down that sidewalk, where she was shot, where she saw little girls who had their whole lives before them cut down in an instant. She pointed to where the boys were, to where her friend Shannon Wright died protecting her students. She showed her the place where colleagues carried her out of the line of fire, where she lay on the ground, her colleagues plugging her wound and yelling at her to hang on.

There were so many thoughts going through her mind in those minutes after the shooting, weird ones that today she cannot explain. Was her house clean? Why had she just eaten that apple and banana for lunch instead of something better if that was going to be her last meal? As the minutes passed, she was more and more certain she was going to die right there. Wasn’t this the way it always was in the westerns she liked to watch. A bullet in the gut was deadly.

A memorial garden in honor of the victims, near Westside Middle School. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

She worried about her husband and her kids and how she hadn’t been able to say goodbye to her parents. As she felt herself begin to slip out of consciousness, she saw that bright light people are always talking about. She was sure it was heaven. But something seemed to hold her back. Something in her heart told her she had to forgive whoever it was that did this to her and to her school. She had no idea who had fired those shots, but there on the ground she willed herself to forgive. She wouldn’t be a Christian if she only followed part of what Jesus said.

“I didn’t know it was the boys,” she recalled. “I was expecting big men in camo to come running around with the big guns in their hands. I never thought it was the kids. That was one of the biggest surprises.”

Thetford later woke up in the hospital. God, it seems, wasn’t done with her yet. The doctor told her she’d lost two 2-liter Coke bottles full of blood. She was lucky to be alive. Someone finally told her who had fired the guns. Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson. She thought of her deal with God. She had to forgive, and she had to keep forgiving.

Maybe that’s how a few weeks later she found herself comforting Golden’s parents, listening to his mother cry about how her baby was in jail downtown, so close, and she couldn’t hug him or hold him. The boy who had shot and nearly killed her. “I just cried. I cried with them,” she said.

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Trump tells Alabama the ‘future of the country’ depends on electing Roy Moore

Just four days to go before a closely watched special election to fill Alabama’s open U.S. Senate seat, President Trump urged voters to turn out for Republican Roy Moore and took his support a step further, pointedly mocking one of the women who has accused Moore of sexual misconduct.

Speaking at a rally in Pensacola, Fla., just miles from the Alabama border, Trump repeated his support for Moore, a controversial former judge who has been shunned by most mainstream Republicans after multiple women came forward to accuse him of pursuing them romantically when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.

Among the accusers is Beverly Young Nelson, who has accused Moore of groping her when she was just 16 and he was 30. The encounter came after Moore, who was then a district attorney in Gadsden, Ala., offered the woman a ride home. As proof, Nelson had pointed to an inscription she said Moore left in her yearbook a week or two before the alleged assault, but on Friday, she acknowledged she had written a few of the words under the inscription — specifically the date (“12-22-77”) and location (“Old Hickory House”).

On Friday, Moore, who has denied any wrongdoing and denied knowing Nelson or any of his accusers, used the admission to attack Nelson on Twitter — insisting that she had admitted to “lying.”

President Trump speaks during a rally in Pensacola, Fla. (Photo: Jonathan Bachman/AP)

Hours later, Trump picked up the charge, bringing up the yearbook and attacking Nelson’s attorney, Gloria Allred, who has also represented several women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct.

“Did you see what happened today? You know the yearbook? Did you see that? There was a little mistake made! She started writing things in the yearbook! Oh, what are we going to do,” Trump said, adding, “Gloria Allred. Every time you see her, you know something’s going wrong.”

In remarks that took up only a few minutes of a nearly hour-and-a-half-long speech mostly reprising familiar themes from his campaign and post-inauguration rallies, Trump made a plea for Alabamans to turn out for Moore, arguing the “future of the country” is at risk if Republicans lose another seat in the Senate. He attacked Doug Jones, Moore’s Democratic opponent, describing him as a “liberal Democrat who is completely controlled by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.”

“He is their total puppet and everybody knows it. He will never ever vote for us,” Trump said. “We need somebody in that Senate seat who will vote for our ‘Make America Great’ agenda. … So get out and vote for Roy Moore. Do it, do it.”

Read more from Yahoo News:

White House: Trump ‘doesn’t necessarily’ agree with Moore about barring Muslims from Congress

Roy Moore accuser: ‘I wonder how many me’s he doesn’t know’

The women who have accused Roy Moore

#MeAt14: Women tweet photos of when they were age Roy Moore’s accuser was

Alabama Senate race gets even stranger as Democrat quotes Ivanka in ad

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Sutherland Springs church pastor says he’s struggling to deal with his grief

Pastor Frank Pomeroy hugs a woman during a visit with family and victims of the shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. (Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters)

Nearly three weeks after a gunman stormed into the Sutherland Springs Baptist Church in Texas and massacred 26 people in the worst mass shooting in the state’s history, the church’s pastor says he is struggling to deal with his grief and that his sadness is compounded by guilt over what he might have done to stop the shooting.

Speaking to the New York Times in his first interview since the attack, Pastor Frank Pomeroy said he regularly carried a concealed weapon when he preached on Sunday mornings. But on Nov. 5, he was absent from the pulpit, attending a gun training class hundreds of miles away in Oklahoma City when he got a text message from the church’s videographer that read: “Shooting at church.”

Pomeroy tells the Times he thought the text message was a joke at first, but the camera operator, who was shot, told him it wasn’t. The pastor began frantically calling others in the church, trying to find out what had happened. But the phones just rang and rang. More than half of those inside the small community church were dead, including Pomeroy’s 14-year-old daughter, Annabelle, while another 20 were wounded.

The weeks since have been a blur of funerals, hospital visits to the wounded and meetings with insurance companies, lawyers and others about the future of the church. Pomeroy tells the Times that, as a pastor, he has tried his best to offer comfort to his grieving congregation and that they, in turn, have tried to console him, but that he is struggling.

“I feel that I am not grieving as adequately as I should. I feel pretty weak right now, a bit shaky,” Pomeroy said. “It is hard to be strong for everyone else when I have my own heartache. But each day I am able to function a little better.”

A woman prays next to a fence outside the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church last weekend. (Photo: Eric Gay/AP)

But Pomeroy said he struggles with guilt wondering if he might have been able to stop the gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, had he been there that morning. None of the other church members had been armed that morning.

“In a way, I think that if I were there I could have done more,” the pastor told the Times. “But who is to say?”

Weeks later, police still have yet to offer a specific motive in the case. They have said Kelley was engaged in a “domestic dispute” with his mother-in-law, Michelle Shields, who regularly attended the church but was not there that morning. According to police, Shields, whose 22-year-old daughter Danielle had been married to Kelley since 2014, received “threatening text messages” from the gunman ahead of the attack — though it remains unclear exactly when those texts were sent.

According to Pomeroy, Shields missed church that morning because she was at home with her grandson. But her mother, Lula Woicinski White, was killed.

The Shields family has offered no public comment on the attack — silence that has been largely matched by the gunman’s own immediate family, including his parents. Kelley and his wife lived in a converted barn behind his parents’ home on a sprawling wooded property in New Braunfels, about an hour north of Sutherland Springs, though the couple was reportedly estranged.

Balloons are released at a graveside service last week for members of the Holcombe family who were killed in the Sutherland Springs Baptist Church shooting. (Photo: Eric Gay/AP)

Pomeroy tells the Times he knew Kelley and that he had attended services at the church “once or twice a year” with his wife. He in the back and often made “snide remarks” about the church, making clear to the pastor that he was a nonbeliever.

“I tried to talk to him a few times but he wouldn’t listen or engage,” Pomeroy told the Times. “He acted entitled and spoke often in a harsh and ugly way. He seemed like an angry person who had never been taught to treat people the right way.”

Just days before the shooting, on Halloween, the gunman had attended the church’s annual fall festival, where the pastor recalled it “seemed like he was glaring at everybody he walked by.” But Pomeroy said even as cold as Kelley was to him and others in the church he never anticipated him having “the guts or courage” to attack the church as he did.

“My opinion is that he was going to the church to find the mother-in-law and was planning to shoot everybody on that side of the family,” Pomeroy said. “I think he came there for them but intended to do something much bigger.”

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Ward family ripped apart by the Texas church massacre: 'She lived for those kids'

Lorenzo Flores, left, and Terrie Smith weep in remembrance of those killed in the shooting at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, Nov. 9, 2017. (Photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters)

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas — It was Joann Ward’s sixth wedding anniversary, and she already had the perfect day in mind.

A mother of four, Ward had the afternoon off from Theresa’s Kitchen, the tiny restaurant inside the Valero gas station where she worked a few hours a week. And though relatives had offered to watch the kids so that she and her husband, Chris, could get away for a few hours, Ward waved them off.

“She wanted the family to be together,” her father, Bill, said.

Ward, 30, was youngest of nine kids from Castroville, Texas, a small town west of San Antonio, and had grown up wanting a big family of her own. After a few years of ups and downs, she had finally met Chris, whom relatives described as her soul mate. According to friends, Ward saw their anniversary as a celebration of the life and family they had built together. There were her two daughters from previous relationships — Rihanna, 9, and Emily, 7; the daughter she and Chris had together, Brooke, 5; and Ryland, Chris’s 5-year-old son from another relationship whom they were raising full time.

“She was a wonderful mother,” her friend, Terrie Smith, recalled. “She lived for those kids.”

And on a horrific Sunday morning a week ago, Ward would die for them too.

Last Sunday, Ward, as she did every weekend, gathered the kids at their modest ranch house and took them a mile down the dusty country road to the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. Chris wasn’t with them. A truck driver, he had worked the night shift and was sleeping in. After the 11 a.m. worship service, Ward planned to pick up her husband, and together, the family would head to a nearby park for a celebratory picnic.

A Texas state trooper helps erect a fence around the site of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas. (Photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters)

But just minutes into the service, the praise and worship songs were interrupted by a rapid crackle of gunfire. Bullets began spraying through the walls of the tiny church, shattering some of the windows and sending holes of light through the wooden doors at the front entrance. As the congregation of 50 or so tried to discern what was happening, a man dressed all in black stormed in, his face covered by a black mask with a white skull face on the front. The man, later identified by police as Devin Patrick Kelley, carried a Ruger AR-556, a semi-automatic rifle.

“Everybody is gonna f***ing die!” the gunman shouted as he ran up the aisle and began to fire, according to Rosanne Solis, who was sitting on the back row. Her upper arm bleeding from the initial volley of bullets, Solis dropped to the floor under the pew and pretended that she was dead, convinced she wouldn’t make it out alive.

A few rows ahead of her, Ward shoved her daughter Rihanna to the ground as bullets began to fly their way. The 9-year-old’s glasses were hit and blown off her face as she fell, but she crawled under a pew, taking cover. Her mother threw her body atop the other three kids, but the gunman offered no mercy.

According to Solis, Kelley stalked the room as an executioner seemingly determined to kill everyone. She and the handful of other survivors who somehow made it out of the church alive said he seemed to specifically target crying children, shooting them until they were silenced. All told, Texas officials listed 26 fatalities, the victims ranging in age from an unborn baby in utero to a 77-year-old grandfather, in one of the worst mass shootings in recent history and the worst ever at a U.S. house of worship.

Perhaps the most chilling testimony of the horror has come from Ward’s daughter Rihanna, who was grabbed and shoved into a corner of the room by a woman who — as her mother did for other kids — covered the girl’s body with her own until she too was shot. Rihanna, who miraculously escaped physical injury, has told relatives that the gunman shot her mother multiple times, as if he were trying to make sure he had killed not only her but the kids she was sheltering underneath.

An FBI agent investigates the site of the shooting at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas. (Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters)

Ward and her daughters Brooke and Emily were killed. Her son Ryland was shot in the stomach, groin and arm, which was so mutilated by bullets it was nearly amputated. But doctors have been able to stabilize the child, who is likely to be hospitalized for months, according to relatives.

Chris Ward, who was awakened by relatives and ran to the church to trying to find his family last Sunday, has barely budged from his son’s side. He has told relatives he does not believe he can return to his family’s home in Sutherland Springs, where last week grim-faced friends and relatives were gathered grappling with funeral plans and trying to figure out how a family and a town as small as this even begins to recover from a tragedy so horrific.

The family has been overwhelmed by media requests, and a relative said Chris Ward had asked friends and relatives to stop talking to the media because he was pained by the coverage and overwhelmed with guilt that he hadn’t been in church that morning. “I think he wonders like we all do about why this happened? How can you possibly go on when you can’t even comprehend it,” the relative said.

Nearly a week later, authorities still have not given an official explanation of Kelley’s motive, beyond saying that he was engaged in a “domestic dispute” with his mother-in-law, Michelle Shields, who regularly attended the church but was not there that morning. According to police, Shields, whose 22-year-old daughter Danielle has been married to Kelley since 2014, received “threatening text messages” from the gunman before the attack — though it’s unclear exactly when those texts were sent.

The Shields family has offered no public comment on the attack — silence that has been largely matched by the gunman’s own immediate family, including his parents. Kelley and his wife lived in a converted barn behind his parents’ home on a sprawling wooded property in New Braunfels, about an hour north of Sutherland Springs.

The New Braunfels, Texas, residence of Devin Kelley, the alleged perpetrator of a mass shooting at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs. (Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters)

His father, Mickey Kelley, is a programmer who created a type of billing software called Dilloware. His mother, Rebecca, also works for the company, which is operated out of the family home. The gunman also has two sisters, including an older sister who lives in nearby Bryan. In the aftermath of the attack, there have been numerous revelations about the gunman’s troubled history, including a reports of domestic violence and mental health issues that led to him being thrown out of the Air Force. But it’s unclear what his family knew about his issues, past or present. None of Kelley’s relatives responded to requests for comment, though Mickey Kelley told ABC News in a brief statement on Wednesday that the family is “grieving.”

Police have confirmed that Kelley, who had been occasionally spotted at the First Baptist Church with his wife, had been there just five days before he carried out his massacre. He showed up with his two children to the church’s annual fall festival, an alternative celebration to Halloween where both kids and adults dress up in costumes. A friend of Michelle Shields told the Houston Chronicle the family had been having unspecified problems, and while Shields offered no details, the woman saw Kelley’s appearance as a sign that perhaps their relationship was turning a corner.

It’s not entirely clear what the status was of Kelley’s marriage to Danielle Shields. Police have declined to say, but Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt has suggested the couple was estranged, telling reporters that Kelley was angry at his “ex-in-laws.” Asked for further details, he has repeatedly declined to comment.

Several locals say Shields, who is close friends with Pastor Frank Pomeroy and his wife, Sherri, was spotted at the community center a few blocks away from the church in the immediate aftermath of the shooting where friends and relatives had gathered for word about their loved ones. Her 77-year-old mother, Lula Woicinski, who was believed to have lived with Shields and her husband, Ben, was killed in the attack.

Joyce Mires leaves flowers at Lula Woicinski’s memorial. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

According to public records, Shields lives in a house less than a mile away from the church. Reporters who visited the property early in the week found no one home, but on Wednesday, cars were parked in the driveway and the gate was plastered with fresh “No Trespassing” signs.

Kelley’s massacre was stopped when he was shot and wounded by a neighbor, Stephen Willeford. Kelley was hit twice — in the leg and torso — prompting him to drop his rifle. He jumped in his Ford Expedition and fled the scene, though not before shooting at Willeford with another gun from inside his SUV. Willeford flagged down a truck driven by Johnnie Langendorff, and the two pursued Kelley in a high speed chase for roughly 10 miles, until the shooter drove off the road. Police say they found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Investigators have declined to say if they believe Kelley would have continued his rampage, had he not been confronted by Willeford. While Kelley was spotted in the Valero gas station before the shooting, authorities have specifically declined to say if he went anywhere else, including his mother-in-law’s home, which is a less than five-minute drive from the church. But they have pointed out that he had more guns and ammunition in his car. “We cannot say what would have happened had he not been stopped,” Freeman Martin, regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said this week.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, left, hugs Stephen Willeford, the man who stopped alleged shooter Devin Kelley. at a gathering in Floresville, Texas. (Photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters)

The lingering questions about Kelley’s motive and what he might have done, if not stopped, have only added to jitters in a community that to residents had seemed immune from the violence and mass shootings that have erupted in other cities. The attack has hit people of faith particularly hard, as many saw their places of worship as sacred ground that are now no longer truly safe.

At a memorial service on Wednesday for the victims, attended by Vice President Mike Pence, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other dignitaries, many attendees were visibly nervous. The event was held in a high school football stadium in nearby Floresville, where just hours earlier much of the city had been put on lockdown amid rumors of an active shooter.

As with many public events, guns were banned at the memorial — a decision that left some nervous. “I left my gun in the truck, but I really didn’t want to,” said Doug Solis, who drove an hour from Canyon Lake to mourn the victims. The massacre, he said, had exposed how vulnerable people of faith were to similar attacks. “You go and you are there to worship the Lord and give praise, but now you realize that if this can happen to the people of Sutherland Springs, it can happen anywhere.”

Looking towards Sunday, he said he was planning to sit near the back of his church and be the person to keep watch. “It’s sad because this is not what church should be about,” he added. “But this is the way it is now. Nobody is safe.”

A mourner prays at a memorial where 26 were killed at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

While those outside of the community have pointed to the massacre in Sutherland Springs as yet more evidence for the need for new gun control laws, many here have suggested that more guns — not less — seem to be the answer.

That includes a relative of Ward’s, who suggested she would be appalled to see anyone “try to use her death to take away someone’s guns.”

“That’s not what she would have wanted at all,” the relative said.

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‘UNENDING HORROR’: Newspapers cover massacre in Sutherland Springs

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After the killings, shock and grief in a small Texas town

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, TEXAS—It was one of those towns where everybody knows everybody, seemingly far removed from the violence that stalked big cities, where you could leave your front door unlocked and the sound of gunfire signified recreation and not a cause of concern.

But then came Sunday morning, when a man in black armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle showed up at the First Baptist Church. Moving methodically from pew to pew in the tiny sanctuary, he slaughtered half the congregation in a matter of minutes. Survivors describe him hovering over weeping women and crying children, firing hundreds of rounds in an effort to extinguish any sign of life. The local sheriff who was one of the first on the scene initially couldn’t distinguish the 26 dead from the nearly two dozen wounded.

Suddenly, on Monday, Sutherland Springs, this tiny town on the dusty back roads of south Texas that few people had ever heard of joined Newtown, San Bernardino and Oklahoma City on the roll-call of modern American atrocities. This one-stoplight town about 35 miles southeast of San Antonio where everybody knew everybody was suddenly full of strangers, swarmed by hundreds of reporters who parked their rental cars and satellite trucks on every foot of land for a half a mile in every direction from the only major intersection.

Media trucks crowd the only major intersection in Sutherland Springs, Tex., a tiny, one-stoplight town that was the site of Sunday’s mass shooting. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

Grief counselors descended on the area to offer comfort to those in need, but like reporters, many wandered around the few square blocks of the town, much of it behind yellow caution tape, unable to find any “real people” to talk to. Volunteer agencies, like the American Red Cross, showed up in motorhomes ready to render aid, but most workers stood around, looking at their phones for the latest information and talking to members of the media.

“We’re here to help, but it seems like the only people here are reporters,” a counselor with the Billy Graham Ministries who had driven from Dallas, five hours away, told a reporter outside the VP gas station, two blocks from the church and one of just four commercial businesses in town.

Across state Highway 87, the main route through Sutherland Springs, there was a post office. That was next door to the Valero, the other gas station in town, which sits directly across the street from the First Baptist Church. A block from there was the Dollar General, where the parking lot was full of TV reporters doing live shots. The rest of the area was rolling farmland, dotted with the occasional trailer and ranch house.

“This is a small place, which is why you can’t wrap your mind around something like this happening here,” said Lorenzo Flores, who, along with his girlfriend, Terrie Smith, owns a restaurant inside the Valero gas station across the street from the crime scene. “You can’t make any sense of it, no sense at all.”

Photographers film a couple praying during a memorial service held Monday night in Sutherland Springs, Texas. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

Those residents who did emerge were swarmed by reporters who thrust cameras in their faces to capture every word and tear. What did they see? Did they know any victims? How will the town recover? And increasingly, throughout the day, there was the trickier question, particularly for a region where firearms are an integral part of the culture, like going to church and watching football: Should there be new limits on guns to prevent anything like this from happening again?

It was a subject that many here waved off, both residents and local officials, saying it was too soon to talk about as the community recovers from the shock and grief of an attack that affected nearly everyone in this small town of roughly 600.

But those who did talk about it suggested that one lesson of Sunday’s massacre is that more guns seemed to be the answer—not less.

On Sunday, Stephen Willeford, a former NRA instructor who lived across the street from the church, grabbed his rifle when he heard gunfire coming from the sanctuary. He ran outside and began firing at the gunman, identified by police as Devin Patrick Kelley, wounding him at least two times and forcing him to drop his weapon and flee the scene. He and another man, Johnnie Langendorff, pursued Kelley in a high speed chase that ended with the gunman crashing in a field about 10 miles away. Local officials have called Willeford  “a Texas hero”—saying he likely stopped Kelley from enacting more carnage.

On Monday night, Willeford, who gave a single local television interview but has otherwise shunned the reporters, was greeted with tears and hugs as he arrived at a memorial service for the victims at a ballpark a few blocks away from the church.

“People will say you should ban guns like the one that was used by that killer,” said Raymond Martinez, a former resident who returned to town to mourn the victims. “But then the neighbor probably wouldn’t have had his gun and who would have stopped (Kelley) from killing more people?”

Freda Connolly, who lived a few blocks from the church, said she felt dread thinking about a religious sanctuary, a place that should have a feeling of safety and peace, now disrupted by fear. She didn’t necessarily like the idea of people openly carrying guns or seeing police or armed security guarding the doors.

But after this, she understood why people would now feel more than ever the need to have guns. “What choice is there?” she said.

As the sun went down on Monday night on a town that now turns to dealing with how they will mourn and bury the dead, Meredith Cooper stood across the street from the First Baptist Church with her 8-year-old daughter, Heather. The two had driven from San Antonio to visit the scene and mourn with a town that they had no connection to.

Meredith Cooper, from nearby San Antonio, comforts her 8-year-old daughter, Heather, across the street from the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., the site of Sunday’s mass shooting. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

Cooper said her daughter, who had heard about the attack on television, was upset and had wanted to visit the scene to lay flowers for the victims. Her school in San Antonio had been on lockdown earlier Monday, amid a heightened sense of threat. “You have kids her age trying to understand why,” Cooper said, as her daughter began to cry. “How do you explain this to a child when you can’t even understand it?”

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Eyewitness to church shooting: ‘I don’t know what we do now’

Terrie Smith, right, speaks to the media as a friend stands with her for support, in Sutherland Springs, Texas on November 6, 2017. (Photo: Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Tex.—It didn’t sound out of the ordinary at first. A quick pop, pop, pop that was very clearly gunfire, but Terrie Smith had heard noise like that before plenty of times.

It was the soundtrack of any small town here along the back roads of South Texas, where people were known to shoot rattlesnakes and other critters even in broad daylight–sometimes for safety but more often for fun—without anyone blinking an eye.

But as Smith walked into Teresa’s Restaurant, her namesake eatery inside the Valero gas station here just off state highway 87 a little before 11:30 on Sunday morning, the pops suddenly turned into rapid bursts that didn’t stop. “Someone’s shooting out there,” someone yelled.

Running out to the parking lot, she looked across the street to the First Baptist Church, just a hundred or so yards away, where the congregants were some of her closest friends and customers. Near the front of the building, she saw a figure dressed all in black clutching what looked like a machine gun. With every burst of fire, she saw his body visibly quake, as he sprayed the outside the church with bullets again and again.

FBI agents search for clues at the entrance to the First Baptist Church, after a mass shooting that killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas on November 6, 2017. (Photo: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

On Monday, authorities confirmed the gunman was Devin Kelley, 26, from nearby New Braunfels, Tex.—about 40 minutes north of Sutherland Springs. While the investigation is ongoing, police said Kelley may have targeted the church because of a “domestic dispute” with his wife’s family, who attended the church. (They were not in church on Sunday.)

“I couldn’t see his face. I could only see his body shaking and shaking as he shot the gun,” Smith tearfully recalled. “When I close my eyes, I just see him just shooting and shooting and shooting.”

Less than 24 hours later, Smith stood in the same spot in the parking lot of the Valero, recounting to a reporter how time seemed to stand still in that moment, how the gunshots echoed though this tiny town with its single traffic light and how she knew even in that instant that things would probably never be the same ever again.

“Stuff like this doesn’t happen here. It just doesn’t,” she asked, tears running down her face. “We’re a good community. How could this happen here?”

From left are Christopher Rodriguez, Esmeralda Rodriguez, Mona Rodriguez, Jayanthony Hernandez, 12, and Juanita Rodriguez participate in a candlelight vigil for the victims of a fatal shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Sunday, Nov. 5, 2017. (Photo: Laura Skelding/AP)

As Kelley continued to take aim at the church on Sunday morning, something within Smith clicked. She raced towards customers who stood dumbstruck near the gas pumps, staring at the scene of horror across the street, yelling for them to get down. They fell on the ground, crawling toward each other as the shots continued.

During a lull in the gunfire, she and the others crawled toward the store and locked themselves inside. Peeking through the window, she saw the gunman enter the church, where the spray of gunfire continued again and again—though the sound was more muffled and dulled. “There were so many rounds,” she said. “It just went on and on. You could just hear it constantly. And then there was a silence. And then there were more rounds. And then there was silence.”

After a few minutes, she saw a man rush out the back door of the church running toward the store. He was covered in blood and badly injured, with wounds on his head and on his arm. As he got closer, she recognized him as the son of a customer and opened the door. “Somebody’s shooting in there! Somebody went in and shot everybody,” the man gasped as he collapsed to the ground.

As she recalled the moment, Smith could began to sob. “He kept saying, ‘My family’s in there. My family’s in there,’” she said through tears. “And we couldn’t do nothing. We couldn’t do nothing.”

He was the only victim she saw emerge from the church alive.

From across the street, she heard gunfire that didn’t sound like the rapid bursts before. She saw the man police now identify as Kelley running toward his truck, his weapon missing. She heard more shots, this time apparently by a neighbor firing at the gunman. Behind the wheel, Kelley sped into the intersection, where it appeared to Smith that a bullet shattered one of his truck’s windows, and he briefly lost control before heading north on state road 539. He was pursued by a second truck, driven by Johnnie Landendorf, who had been flagged down by the neighbor. The two took off after Kelley, who – according to the account by law-enforcement officials – crashed in a field 10 miles away, and was found dead by police. He had been shot by the neighbor and had also suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound—though officials said the sequence was unclear.

Johnny Langendorff who pursued the suspect of the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church church shooting that killed at least 25 people, waits to be picked up from the scene where the suspect died near the intersection of FM 539 and Sandy Elm Road in Guadalupe County on November 5, 2017. (Photo: William Luther/San Antonio Express-News via ZUMA Wire)

Back at the Valero, where the parking lot on Monday morning was filled with media trucks, Smith cried as she wondered about the fate of her community. It was a town where everybody knew everybody and people banded together in times of hardship. But now 26 people were dead, with many others badly injured.

She knew almost everybody who died. Her best friend Joanna was killed, along with two of her kids. “Her little son is just hanging on,” she said, crying.

Looking back towards the church, she stared, unable to speak as dozens of men and woman in blue FBI jackets slowly walked down a street collecting evidence. On Sunday mornings, the town was so quiet you could often hear the sound of congregants singing praise songs and church hymns inside. But now all she can hear in her memory is the sound of gunfire, those bursts that seemed unending.

“We’re a good community, we’re a good community,” she said. “When people are struggling we all come together. I don’t know what we do now.”

Yahoo News, AP

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Portrait of Las Vegas gunman: a narcissist on a losing streak

Stephen Paddock’s driver license photo. (Photo: U.S. government via NBC News)

Police say the man who shot and killed 58 people and injured more than 540 others in last month’s deadly massacre in Las Vegas was a status-obsessed narcissist who had lost a “significant amount of wealth” in the last two years, something authorities now believe may have played a “determining factor” in the Oct. 1 attack.

In a wide-ranging interview with KLAS-TV, the local CBS affiliate, Las Vegas sheriff Joe Lombardo said gunman Stephen Paddock was a successful real estate investor and prolific gambler whose wealth had fluctuated over the years. But, according to the sheriff, Paddock had been losing money since September 2015, triggering “bouts of depression.”

“This individual was status-driven based on how he liked to be recognized in the casino environment and how he liked to be recognized by his friends and family. So obviously that was starting to decline in the short period of time and that may have had a determining effect on why he did what he did,” Lombardo said. “He was going in the wrong direction.”

But Lombardo cautioned that investigators still have not settled on the precise reason for why Paddock suddenly unleashed a deadly barrage of bullets onto the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival from the windows of his 32nd floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino a month ago. And as he has repeatedly warned in recent weeks, Lombardo acknowledged Paddock’s motive may never truly be understood.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo (L) speaks as U.S. Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) looks on during a news conference at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department headquarters to brief members of the media on a mass shooting on Oct. 2, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nev. (Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

The sheriff characterized Paddock as “non-descript,” methodical in planning the attack and concealing his motives. He confirmed reports that a hard drive from one of the laptops found in the gunman’s hotel suite was missing and said history recovered from Paddock’s other electronic devices had failed to yield clues about the gunman’s “trigger point.”

Though ISIS has claimed credit for the attack, Lombardo said investigators had found no links between Paddock and any terrorist groups and no evidence he had been radicalized. Paddock also did not appear to have any strong political beliefs—though, according to the sheriff, he had recently told an associate that he was happy with Donald Trump’s presidency “because the stock market was doing well.” “That’s the only thing we’ve seen referencing politics,” Lombardo said.

While he suggested Paddock worked to conceal his plot, the sheriff continued to express doubts about the gunman’s friends and family who have insisted they had no inkling of his plans or dangerous state of mind. He specifically mentioned Marilou Danley, Paddock’s longtime girlfriend, and the gunman’s younger brother, Eric, suggesting the “attack could have been prevented on so many levels” had they or anyone reported “some modicum of information that would have presented this individual’s state of mind.”

Authorities are still interviewing Danley, who was visiting family in the Philippines during the Oct. 1 rampage and has insisted she knew nothing of Paddock’s plans. She  has been named a “person of interest” in the case, partly because Paddock reportedly wired her $100,000 in the days before the shooting. Though her attorney, Danley has said she thought the money was Paddock’s “way of breaking up with me.”

Lombardo said that while investigators for the most part accept Danley’s account, he continued to have doubts about her story, telling KLAS, “Personally I find it hard to believe.”

Image released by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department of Marilou Danley in connection to a shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, Oct. 2, 2017. (Photo: Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department/Handout via Reuters)

Among other things, he pointed to Paddock’s arsenal of nearly 50 guns, including the 23 weapons found in his Mandalay Bay hotel room, most of which were purchased in the last year. “There is a lot of people that have hundreds and hundreds of guns, but for this individual to do it at a certain point in time and to do it all with such robust action, you would think that Ms. Danley would have some information associated with that,” Lombardo said. “But currently we haven’t been able to pull that out of her, if it’s in her.”

He also suggested that something seemed off about Paddock’s family, using the word “manic” to describe the gunman’s younger brother, Eric, in his dealings with the media in the aftermath of the shooting. “He continues to talk and continues to … dig a hole,” Lombardo said, though he did not elaborate further.

The interview came amid increasing scrutiny over the police response to the shooting and the handling of the investigation. It remains unclear why it took officers 12 minutes after the shooting began to reach the 32nd floor where the gunman’s suite was located, and why police waited for more than an hour to enter the room after the shooting had stopped. Several questions remain unanswered about what communication there were, if any, between police and hotel security.

Paddock had shot a security guard who approached his room, on an unrelated call, just before he began shooting out the window. Jesus Campos, the wounded security guard, later told talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, in his only public interview, that he immediately radioed hotel security that he had been shot. But it’s still unclear exactly what time Campos relayed that information to the hotel and how or if casino officials communicated that information to the police.

On Thursday, more than a dozen news organizations, including the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times ABC News, CNN and the Las Vegas Review Journal, filed two lawsuits—one seeking access to audio of 911 calls, body camera video and other still undisclosed police records related to the shooting and the other seeking to unseal court papers related to search warrants connected to the investigation, including any served on Mandalay Bay.

Eric Paddock brother of Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock, speaks to members of the media outside his home, Monday, Oct. 2, 2017, in Orlando, Fla. Paddock told the Orlando Sentinel: “We are completely dumbfounded. We can’t understand what happened.” (Photo: John Raoux/AP)

The Las Vegas police have declined to comment on the lawsuits, but Lombardo used his interview, which was taped ahead of the court filings, not only to defend his department’s response but the employees at the casino. “I don’t want anyone perceiving that MGM and Mandalay Bay didn’t do their job,” he said. While he was not asked specifically about the casino’s actions on the night of the shooting, the sheriff defended Mandalay Bay against suggestions its employees failed to question Paddock about the arsenal of weapons he amassed in his suite.

Offering some new details, Lombardo said he believes Paddock may have carried the guns unnoticed, moving them upstairs in separate bags over several days starting on Sept. 25, the day he checked in.

“I wouldn’t say nobody saw him bringing bags into the hotel. People saw him but ten to fifteen thousand people a day go through those doors …and was he doing it over a period of several days which would not bring attention to him,” he said. “There was nothing that stuck out. They had experience with this individual. They knew him.”

Lombardo confirmed that Mandalay Bay had handed over hours of video around the casino and that police had so far viewed about “90 to 95 percent” of it. Despite reports that the shooter had been seen with a possible accomplice, and notwithstanding that he ordered dinner for two from room service on the night of the attack, Paddock was alone, the sheriff said.

Though Campos and a hotel maintenance worker who had also arrived on the floor both radioed word of the shooting, police apparently didn’t identify where the shots were coming from until roughly seven minutes after Paddock began shooting out the window at concertgoers. According to the timeline, police reached the 31st floor at 10:12pm, where officers reported that shots were coming from the floor above them. They finally reached the 32nd floor at 10:17 pm—two minutes after Paddock stopped shooting. Police did not breach Paddock’s room until 11:20 pm—over an hour later—where they found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Interior view of Stephen Paddock’s room at the Mandalay Hotel showing weapons he may have used during his mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, Nev., on Oct 1, 2017. (Photo: Anonymous)

Police originally said Campos interrupted the shooting, bringing the deadly rampage to a stop. But they later said Paddock stopped firing on his own. Police still have no clear answer for why Paddock stopped shooting. According to Lombardo, the gunman still had 4,000 rounds of ammunition left in his room when he killed himself. He also had tactical equipment in the room and a vehicle downstairs with thousands of rounds of additional ammunition as well as explosives that have led police to speculate he possibly intended to escape and unleash more violence elsewhere.

Speaking to KLAS, Lombardo theorized that Paddock may have believed that police were closing in. Investigators found the shooter had researched police response tactics in planning his massacre. “Maybe he felt like he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. …He had to have been aware we were probably going to come in the door any minute,” Lombardo said.

But the sheriff acknowledged that it was one of the many questions that are likely to go unanswered in the investigation. With officials reaching dead ends in their search for a clear motive, Lombardo said he hoped something would turn up in the examination of the gunman’s brain to a laboratory at Stanford University – although scientists say it’s a long shot.

Photos and notes adorn a wall at the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden, Monday, Oct. 16, 2017, in Las Vegas. The garden was built as a memorial for the victims of the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas. (Photo: John Locher/AP)

“I actually hope we find something in the pathology of his brain that will help us understand this,” Lombardo said. “I am as frustrated as anyone… Why would this individual take it upon himself to cause the worst mass shooting in our lifetime? Without reason or cause? We haven’t gotten that answer yet.”

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[h-bailey]

Portrait of Las Vegas gunman: a narcissist on a losing streak

Stephen Paddock’s driver license photo. (Photo: U.S. government via NBC News)

Police say the man who shot and killed 58 people and injured more than 540 others in last month’s deadly massacre in Las Vegas was a status-obsessed narcissist who had lost a “significant amount of wealth” in the last two years, something authorities now believe may have played a “determining factor” in the Oct. 1 attack.

In a wide-ranging interview with KLAS-TV, the local CBS affiliate, Las Vegas sheriff Joe Lombardo said gunman Stephen Paddock was a successful real estate investor and prolific gambler whose wealth had fluctuated over the years. But, according to the sheriff, Paddock had been losing money since September 2015, triggering “bouts of depression.”

“This individual was status-driven based on how he liked to be recognized in the casino environment and how he liked to be recognized by his friends and family. So obviously that was starting to decline in the short period of time and that may have had a determining effect on why he did what he did,” Lombardo said. “He was going in the wrong direction.”

But Lombardo cautioned that investigators still have not settled on the precise reason for why Paddock suddenly unleashed a deadly barrage of bullets onto the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival from the windows of his 32nd floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino a month ago. And as he has repeatedly warned in recent weeks, Lombardo acknowledged Paddock’s motive may never truly be understood.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo (L) speaks as U.S. Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) looks on during a news conference at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department headquarters to brief members of the media on a mass shooting on Oct. 2, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nev. (Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

The sheriff characterized Paddock as “non-descript,” methodical in planning the attack and concealing his motives. He confirmed reports that a hard drive from one of the laptops found in the gunman’s hotel suite was missing and said history recovered from Paddock’s other electronic devices had failed to yield clues about the gunman’s “trigger point.”

Though ISIS has claimed credit for the attack, Lombardo said investigators had found no links between Paddock and any terrorist groups and no evidence he had been radicalized. Paddock also did not appear to have any strong political beliefs—though, according to the sheriff, he had recently told an associate that he was happy with Donald Trump’s presidency “because the stock market was doing well.” “That’s the only thing we’ve seen referencing politics,” Lombardo said.

While he suggested Paddock worked to conceal his plot, the sheriff continued to express doubts about the gunman’s friends and family who have insisted they had no inkling of his plans or dangerous state of mind. He specifically mentioned Marilou Danley, Paddock’s longtime girlfriend, and the gunman’s younger brother, Eric, suggesting the “attack could have been prevented on so many levels” had they or anyone reported “some modicum of information that would have presented this individual’s state of mind.”

Authorities are still interviewing Danley, who was visiting family in the Philippines during the Oct. 1 rampage and has insisted she knew nothing of Paddock’s plans. She  has been named a “person of interest” in the case, partly because Paddock reportedly wired her $100,000 in the days before the shooting. Though her attorney, Danley has said she thought the money was Paddock’s “way of breaking up with me.”

Lombardo said that while investigators for the most part accept Danley’s account, he continued to have doubts about her story, telling KLAS, “Personally I find it hard to believe.”

Image released by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department of Marilou Danley in connection to a shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, Oct. 2, 2017. (Photo: Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department/Handout via Reuters)

Among other things, he pointed to Paddock’s arsenal of nearly 50 guns, including the 23 weapons found in his Mandalay Bay hotel room, most of which were purchased in the last year. “There is a lot of people that have hundreds and hundreds of guns, but for this individual to do it at a certain point in time and to do it all with such robust action, you would think that Ms. Danley would have some information associated with that,” Lombardo said. “But currently we haven’t been able to pull that out of her, if it’s in her.”

He also suggested that something seemed off about Paddock’s family, using the word “manic” to describe the gunman’s younger brother, Eric, in his dealings with the media in the aftermath of the shooting. “He continues to talk and continues to … dig a hole,” Lombardo said, though he did not elaborate further.

The interview came amid increasing scrutiny over the police response to the shooting and the handling of the investigation. It remains unclear why it took officers 12 minutes after the shooting began to reach the 32nd floor where the gunman’s suite was located, and why police waited for more than an hour to enter the room after the shooting had stopped. Several questions remain unanswered about what communication there were, if any, between police and hotel security.

Paddock had shot a security guard who approached his room, on an unrelated call, just before he began shooting out the window. Jesus Campos, the wounded security guard, later told talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, in his only public interview, that he immediately radioed hotel security that he had been shot. But it’s still unclear exactly what time Campos relayed that information to the hotel and how or if casino officials communicated that information to the police.

On Thursday, more than a dozen news organizations, including the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times ABC News, CNN and the Las Vegas Review Journal, filed two lawsuits—one seeking access to audio of 911 calls, body camera video and other still undisclosed police records related to the shooting and the other seeking to unseal court papers related to search warrants connected to the investigation, including any served on Mandalay Bay.

Eric Paddock brother of Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock, speaks to members of the media outside his home, Monday, Oct. 2, 2017, in Orlando, Fla. Paddock told the Orlando Sentinel: “We are completely dumbfounded. We can’t understand what happened.” (Photo: John Raoux/AP)

The Las Vegas police have declined to comment on the lawsuits, but Lombardo used his interview, which was taped ahead of the court filings, not only to defend his department’s response but the employees at the casino. “I don’t want anyone perceiving that MGM and Mandalay Bay didn’t do their job,” he said. While he was not asked specifically about the casino’s actions on the night of the shooting, the sheriff defended Mandalay Bay against suggestions its employees failed to question Paddock about the arsenal of weapons he amassed in his suite.

Offering some new details, Lombardo said he believes Paddock may have carried the guns unnoticed, moving them upstairs in separate bags over several days starting on Sept. 25, the day he checked in.

“I wouldn’t say nobody saw him bringing bags into the hotel. People saw him but ten to fifteen thousand people a day go through those doors …and was he doing it over a period of several days which would not bring attention to him,” he said. “There was nothing that stuck out. They had experience with this individual. They knew him.”

Lombardo confirmed that Mandalay Bay had handed over hours of video around the casino and that police had so far viewed about “90 to 95 percent” of it. Despite reports that the shooter had been seen with a possible accomplice, and notwithstanding that he ordered dinner for two from room service on the night of the attack, Paddock was alone, the sheriff said.

Though Campos and a hotel maintenance worker who had also arrived on the floor both radioed word of the shooting, police apparently didn’t identify where the shots were coming from until roughly seven minutes after Paddock began shooting out the window at concertgoers. According to the timeline, police reached the 31st floor at 10:12pm, where officers reported that shots were coming from the floor above them. They finally reached the 32nd floor at 10:17 pm—two minutes after Paddock stopped shooting. Police did not breach Paddock’s room until 11:20 pm—over an hour later—where they found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Interior view of Stephen Paddock’s room at the Mandalay Hotel showing weapons he may have used during his mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, Nev., on Oct 1, 2017. (Photo: Anonymous)

Police originally said Campos interrupted the shooting, bringing the deadly rampage to a stop. But they later said Paddock stopped firing on his own. Police still have no clear answer for why Paddock stopped shooting. According to Lombardo, the gunman still had 4,000 rounds of ammunition left in his room when he killed himself. He also had tactical equipment in the room and a vehicle downstairs with thousands of rounds of additional ammunition as well as explosives that have led police to speculate he possibly intended to escape and unleash more violence elsewhere.

Speaking to KLAS, Lombardo theorized that Paddock may have believed that police were closing in. Investigators found the shooter had researched police response tactics in planning his massacre. “Maybe he felt like he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. …He had to have been aware we were probably going to come in the door any minute,” Lombardo said.

But the sheriff acknowledged that it was one of the many questions that are likely to go unanswered in the investigation. With officials reaching dead ends in their search for a clear motive, Lombardo said he hoped something would turn up in the examination of the gunman’s brain to a laboratory at Stanford University – although scientists say it’s a long shot.

Photos and notes adorn a wall at the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden, Monday, Oct. 16, 2017, in Las Vegas. The garden was built as a memorial for the victims of the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas. (Photo: John Locher/AP)

“I actually hope we find something in the pathology of his brain that will help us understand this,” Lombardo said. “I am as frustrated as anyone… Why would this individual take it upon himself to cause the worst mass shooting in our lifetime? Without reason or cause? We haven’t gotten that answer yet.”

_____

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[h-bailey]

One month later, Las Vegas massacre is still a mystery

Workers board up a broken window at the Mandalay Bay hotel, where shooter Stephen Paddock conducted his mass shooting along the Las Vegas Strip, in Las Vegas, Nev., Oct. 6, 2017. (Photo: Chris Wattie/Reuters)

The shattered windows were boarded up weeks ago, and the crime scene across the street largely cleared of the shoes, bags and other personal effects left behind when thousands of concertgoers ran for their lives.

But one month after Stephen Paddock unleashed a hail of bullets onto the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival from the windows of his 32nd floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and injuring more than 540 in the worst mass shooting in the nation’s recent history, the investigation of the crime seems frozen in time.

After weeks of interviewing the lone gunman’s family and associates and combing through his two homes and belongings for clues, police appear to be no closer to understanding why Paddock, a 64-year-old real estate investor and avid gambler with no record of mental illness, political or religious extremism, became a mass killer. Or if they are, they aren’t saying.

The lack of understanding makes a sharp contrast to Tuesday’s car attack in New York City, and numerous other mass killings in recent years, which have clear ideological or religious motives.

It’s been more than two weeks since officials with the Las Vegas police and the FBI briefed the public, bringing an abrupt stop to the flow of information about the case. Until then, investigators had been unusually forthcoming, holding frequent news conferences in the days after the shooting. They released video from police body cameras and put forward police officers who told harrowing accounts of responding to the scene and closing in on the hotel room from which Paddock had unleashed his horror.

But then there were a series of missteps, including the release of a timeline of the shooting that turned out to be wrong. The last time Las Vegas Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who has been the face of the investigation, spoke publicly about the case was Oct. 13, when he went before reporters to correct a comprehensive timeline of the shooting he had released previously.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo left, pauses during a news conference at the Metropolitan Police Department in Las Vegas, as FBI special agent Aaron Rouse, right, looks on, Friday, Oct. 13, 2017. (Photo: Heidi Fang/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)

But in doing so, Lombardo only raised more questions about his department’s handling of the investigation. A month later, it’s still unclear why it took officers 12 minutes after the shooting began to reach the 32nd floor, where the gunman’s suite was located, and why it took more than an hour for cops to enter the room after the shooting had stopped.

And one of the biggest mysteries continues to be what communication there were, if any, between police and Mandalay Bay. Paddock had shot a security guard who approached his room, on an unrelated call, just before he began shooting out the window. Jesus Campos, the wounded security guard, told talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, in his only public interview, that he immediately radioed hotel security that he had been shot. But it’s still unclear how or if casino officials communicated that information to the police.

According to the latest timeline released in the case, Campos first discovered something was amiss on the 32nd floor around 9:59 pm that night when he found a stairwell door near Paddock’s room barricaded by a metal bar. At the time, Campos later told authorities, he heard the sounds of what he thought was a power drill, which he found unusual. He went back to the 31st floor and took another route up to the 32nd floor.

As Campos approached room 135, where Paddock was staying, the gunman, who had been monitoring the hallway outside his room with a baby monitor set up on a room service cart, suddenly shot through the door, spraying hundreds of bullets and wounding the guard on the leg. It was 10:05 pm, roughly the time police believe Paddock began shooting across the street toward the site of the Route 91 festival.

Stephen Schuck, left, and Jesus Campos appear with host Ellen Degeneres during a taping of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif., on Oct. 17, 2017. Schuck, a building engineer, and Campos, a security guard, were working at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino the night of the mass shooting on Oct. 1. Campos was shot by gunman Stephen Paddock. (Photo: Michael Rozman/Warner Bros./AP)

Though Campos and a hotel maintenance worker who had also arrived on the floor both radioed word of the shooting, police apparently didn’t identify where the shots were coming from for several minutes. According to the timeline, police reached the 31st floor at 10:12pm, where officers reported that shots were coming from the floor above them. They finally reached the 32nd floor at 10:17 pm—two minutes after Paddock stopped shooting. Police did not breach Paddock’s room until 11:20 pm—over an hour later—where they found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Police originally said Campos interrupted the shooting, bringing the deadly rampage to a stop. But now they say Paddock stopped firing on his own. Why? It’s one of the many enduring mysteries of the case—and one that Lombardo has said may never be answered.

But in recent days, there have been more mysteries. This week, Lombardo confirmed to the Las Vegas Review Journal that police are investigating how an officer “accidentally” fired his gun inside Paddock’s suite after it was breached—though he said it was not in the room where the gunman’s body was found.

At the same time, unnamed law enforcement officials told the New York Times and Associated Press that a hard drive was missing from at least one of the laptops recovered from Paddock’s hotel room, further complicating their efforts to uncover a motive in the case. It’s unclear if the hard drive was simply missing or if it was destroyed—a move that would mimic the actions of other mass killers like Adam Lanza, who removed and smashed his computer hard drives before he massacred more than a dozen people at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

Stephen Paddock’s body is visible in his room at the Mandalay Hotel along with weapons he may have used during his mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, Nev., on Oct 1, 2017. (Photo: Anonymous)

Another enduring mystery is Marilou Danley, the gunman’s longtime girlfriend, who was visiting family in the Philippines when Paddock carried out his rampage. Officials quickly described her as a “person of interest” in the case, in part because Paddock reportedly wired her $100,000 in the days before the shooting. In a statement released by her attorney, Danley, who returned to the U.S. on Oct. 3, insisted she knew nothing of Paddock’s plans and said she believed the money he sent her was “a way of breaking up with me.”

Danley was questioned by the FBI on Oct. 4 in Los Angeles, where her daughter lives. But it’s unclear if she is still cooperating with the investigation or what she has told authorities. Her attorney did not respond to a request for comment. Las Vegas police officials have referred questions about her to the FBI, which has also repeatedly declined to comment. But Lombardo has expressed skepticism that Paddock could have assembled his arsenal of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition without notice. The sheriff has also said he believes Paddock, who had explosive material and more ammunition in his car, intended to survive the massacre and escape—though he has not explained how he might have carried that off.

The Clark County Coroner has completed the autopsy on Paddock—though the agency and police have declined to elaborate on what, if anything, was found except to say there was no obvious abnormalities of his brain. Paddock’s brain was scheduled to be sent this week to a laboratory at Stanford University, where doctors will perform further forensic analysis, including tissue testing, to look for neurological problems—though medical experts have said it’s unlikely that will provide an explanation for the rampage.

While Las Vegas officials say they will again brief the public on the case when there is something new to report, some revelations could come through civil lawsuits against Paddock’s estate and the casino’s parent company, MGM Resorts. At least two suits have been filed so far, including one class action case representing 10 victims.

Image released by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department of Marilou Danley in connection to a shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, Oct. 2, 2017.(Photo: Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department/Handout via Reuters)

Among other things, the suits have sought to uncover information from Mandalay Bay, which has repeatedly declined to comment citing the ongoing investigation. The victims want access to hotel records, including video, which might offer clues about Paddock’s stay. He checked into the casino on Sept. 25—nearly a week before the attack—and witnesses have told police they saw him playing video poker and around the casino. Police have said they believe he left the casino and returned to his home in Mesquite, Nev., about 90 minutes west of Las Vegas, at least once that week and may have visited other casinos on the strip.

A point of interest is how Paddock got his arsenal up to his room and whether hotel staff, including housekeeping, sensed anything was amiss. In an interview with 60 Minutes, responding officers said Paddock’s room was filled with weapons and gear.  “It just looked almost like a gun store,��� Dave Newton, one of the officers told CBS. There were “all kinds of monitors and electrical equipment …a few phones …a couple of laptops. A lot of drills, drill bits, all kinds of tools.”

Lombardo has already said there were no cameras near Paddock’s room—only near the elevator banks down the hall. But officers have said they found evidence that the gunman had been drilling holes in the wall—including one near the front door of his suite—raising questions about his intents and whether staff or other guests reported hearing the noise of power tools in Paddock’s room or in the hallway, where he barricaded the door.

On Tuesday, attorneys and legal experts for the victims gained access to the Route 91 site for the first time, walking the grounds from which personal belongings have been removed, but the concert stage and other fixtures have been left untouched in the month since the shooting. They are expected to gain access to Paddock’s suite at Mandalay Bay in coming days.

A member of the FBI walks among piles of personal items at the scene of a mass shooting Friday, Oct. 6, 2017, in Las Vegas. (Photo: John Locher/AP)

Among the lawyers walking the grounds was Craig Eiland, an attorney representing Rachel Shepard, a 26-year-old California women who was shot three times, including in the chest, on that Sunday night. It was a “miracle,” her attorney said, that she lived. And now she wants to know how this could have happened.

“This is about answers first,” Eiland told reporters on Tuesday at the scene. “How did it happen? And what can be done to prevent it from happening again?”

_____

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[h-bailey]

One month later, Las Vegas massacre is still a mystery

Workers board up a broken window at the Mandalay Bay hotel, where shooter Stephen Paddock conducted his mass shooting along the Las Vegas Strip, in Las Vegas, Nev., Oct. 6, 2017. (Photo: Chris Wattie/Reuters)

The shattered windows were boarded up weeks ago, and the crime scene across the street largely cleared of the shoes, bags and other personal effects left behind when thousands of concertgoers ran for their lives.

But one month after Stephen Paddock unleashed a hail of bullets onto the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival from the windows of his 32nd floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and injuring more than 540 in the worst mass shooting in the nation’s recent history, the investigation of the crime seems frozen in time.

After weeks of interviewing the lone gunman’s family and associates and combing through his two homes and belongings for clues, police appear to be no closer to understanding why Paddock, a 64-year-old real estate investor and avid gambler with no record of mental illness, political or religious extremism, became a mass killer. Or if they are, they aren’t saying.

The lack of understanding makes a sharp contrast to Tuesday’s car attack in New York City, and numerous other mass killings in recent years, which have clear ideological or religious motives.

It’s been more than two weeks since officials with the Las Vegas police and the FBI briefed the public, bringing an abrupt stop to the flow of information about the case. Until then, investigators had been unusually forthcoming, holding frequent news conferences in the days after the shooting. They released video from police body cameras and put forward police officers who told harrowing accounts of responding to the scene and closing in on the hotel room from which Paddock had unleashed his horror.

But then there were a series of missteps, including the release of a timeline of the shooting that turned out to be wrong. The last time Las Vegas Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who has been the face of the investigation, spoke publicly about the case was Oct. 13, when he went before reporters to correct a comprehensive timeline of the shooting he had released previously.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo left, pauses during a news conference at the Metropolitan Police Department in Las Vegas, as FBI special agent Aaron Rouse, right, looks on, Friday, Oct. 13, 2017. (Photo: Heidi Fang/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)

But in doing so, Lombardo only raised more questions about his department’s handling of the investigation. A month later, it’s still unclear why it took officers 12 minutes after the shooting began to reach the 32nd floor, where the gunman’s suite was located, and why it took more than an hour for cops to enter the room after the shooting had stopped.

And one of the biggest mysteries continues to be what communication there were, if any, between police and Mandalay Bay. Paddock had shot a security guard who approached his room, on an unrelated call, just before he began shooting out the window. Jesus Campos, the wounded security guard, told talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, in his only public interview, that he immediately radioed hotel security that he had been shot. But it’s still unclear how or if casino officials communicated that information to the police.

According to the latest timeline released in the case, Campos first discovered something was amiss on the 32nd floor around 9:59 pm that night when he found a stairwell door near Paddock’s room barricaded by a metal bar. At the time, Campos later told authorities, he heard the sounds of what he thought was a power drill, which he found unusual. He went back to the 31st floor and took another route up to the 32nd floor.

As Campos approached room 135, where Paddock was staying, the gunman, who had been monitoring the hallway outside his room with a baby monitor set up on a room service cart, suddenly shot through the door, spraying hundreds of bullets and wounding the guard on the leg. It was 10:05 pm, roughly the time police believe Paddock began shooting across the street toward the site of the Route 91 festival.

Stephen Schuck, left, and Jesus Campos appear with host Ellen Degeneres during a taping of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif., on Oct. 17, 2017. Schuck, a building engineer, and Campos, a security guard, were working at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino the night of the mass shooting on Oct. 1. Campos was shot by gunman Stephen Paddock. (Photo: Michael Rozman/Warner Bros./AP)

Though Campos and a hotel maintenance worker who had also arrived on the floor both radioed word of the shooting, police apparently didn’t identify where the shots were coming from for several minutes. According to the timeline, police reached the 31st floor at 10:12pm, where officers reported that shots were coming from the floor above them. They finally reached the 32nd floor at 10:17 pm—two minutes after Paddock stopped shooting. Police did not breach Paddock’s room until 11:20 pm—over an hour later—where they found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Police originally said Campos interrupted the shooting, bringing the deadly rampage to a stop. But now they say Paddock stopped firing on his own. Why? It’s one of the many enduring mysteries of the case—and one that Lombardo has said may never be answered.

But in recent days, there have been more mysteries. This week, Lombardo confirmed to the Las Vegas Review Journal that police are investigating how an officer “accidentally” fired his gun inside Paddock’s suite after it was breached—though he said it was not in the room where the gunman’s body was found.

At the same time, unnamed law enforcement officials told the New York Times and Associated Press that a hard drive was missing from at least one of the laptops recovered from Paddock’s hotel room, further complicating their efforts to uncover a motive in the case. It’s unclear if the hard drive was simply missing or if it was destroyed—a move that would mimic the actions of other mass killers like Adam Lanza, who removed and smashed his computer hard drives before he massacred more than a dozen people at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

Stephen Paddock’s body is visible in his room at the Mandalay Hotel along with weapons he may have used during his mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, Nev., on Oct 1, 2017. (Photo: Anonymous)

Another enduring mystery is Marilou Danley, the gunman’s longtime girlfriend, who was visiting family in the Philippines when Paddock carried out his rampage. Officials quickly described her as a “person of interest” in the case, in part because Paddock reportedly wired her $100,000 in the days before the shooting. In a statement released by her attorney, Danley, who returned to the U.S. on Oct. 3, insisted she knew nothing of Paddock’s plans and said she believed the money he sent her was “a way of breaking up with me.”

Danley was questioned by the FBI on Oct. 4 in Los Angeles, where her daughter lives. But it’s unclear if she is still cooperating with the investigation or what she has told authorities. Her attorney did not respond to a request for comment. Las Vegas police officials have referred questions about her to the FBI, which has also repeatedly declined to comment. But Lombardo has expressed skepticism that Paddock could have assembled his arsenal of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition without notice. The sheriff has also said he believes Paddock, who had explosive material and more ammunition in his car, intended to survive the massacre and escape—though he has not explained how he might have carried that off.

The Clark County Coroner has completed the autopsy on Paddock—though the agency and police have declined to elaborate on what, if anything, was found except to say there was no obvious abnormalities of his brain. Paddock’s brain was scheduled to be sent this week to a laboratory at Stanford University, where doctors will perform further forensic analysis, including tissue testing, to look for neurological problems—though medical experts have said it’s unlikely that will provide an explanation for the rampage.

While Las Vegas officials say they will again brief the public on the case when there is something new to report, some revelations could come through civil lawsuits against Paddock’s estate and the casino’s parent company, MGM Resorts. At least two suits have been filed so far, including one class action case representing 10 victims.

Image released by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department of Marilou Danley in connection to a shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, Oct. 2, 2017.(Photo: Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department/Handout via Reuters)

Among other things, the suits have sought to uncover information from Mandalay Bay, which has repeatedly declined to comment citing the ongoing investigation. The victims want access to hotel records, including video, which might offer clues about Paddock’s stay. He checked into the casino on Sept. 25—nearly a week before the attack—and witnesses have told police they saw him playing video poker and around the casino. Police have said they believe he left the casino and returned to his home in Mesquite, Nev., about 90 minutes west of Las Vegas, at least once that week and may have visited other casinos on the strip.

A point of interest is how Paddock got his arsenal up to his room and whether hotel staff, including housekeeping, sensed anything was amiss. In an interview with 60 Minutes, responding officers said Paddock’s room was filled with weapons and gear.  “It just looked almost like a gun store,” Dave Newton, one of the officers told CBS. There were “all kinds of monitors and electrical equipment …a few phones …a couple of laptops. A lot of drills, drill bits, all kinds of tools.”

Lombardo has already said there were no cameras near Paddock’s room—only near the elevator banks down the hall. But officers have said they found evidence that the gunman had been drilling holes in the wall—including one near the front door of his suite—raising questions about his intents and whether staff or other guests reported hearing the noise of power tools in Paddock’s room or in the hallway, where he barricaded the door.

On Tuesday, attorneys and legal experts for the victims gained access to the Route 91 site for the first time, walking the grounds from which personal belongings have been removed, but the concert stage and other fixtures have been left untouched in the month since the shooting. They are expected to gain access to Paddock’s suite at Mandalay Bay in coming days.

A member of the FBI walks among piles of personal items at the scene of a mass shooting Friday, Oct. 6, 2017, in Las Vegas. (Photo: John Locher/AP)

Among the lawyers walking the grounds was Craig Eiland, an attorney representing Rachel Shepard, a 26-year-old California women who was shot three times, including in the chest, on that Sunday night. It was a “miracle,” her attorney said, that she lived. And now she wants to know how this could have happened.

“This is about answers first,” Eiland told reporters on Tuesday at the scene. “How did it happen? And what can be done to prevent it from happening again?”

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:

A surreal scene as Las Vegas returns to business after Sunday massacre

Portrait of a mass killer: The details don’t add up

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[h-bailey]

Las Vegas sheriff, in emotional press conference, admits he’s still searching for answers

Joe Lombardo was having a late dinner with friends from out of town when his cell phone suddenly blew up with messages. Shots had been fired on the south end of the Las Vegas strip, about 10 minutes from where he was. With a few rushed apologies, he stood and ran out, hoping it would only be a minor diversion.

It took only seconds for Lombardo, the Clark County sheriff, to realize this would be no ordinary Sunday night call. As he rushed past unsuspecting crowds illuminated by the flashing lights of the casinos along the north end of the strip, radio traffic revealed chaos mere blocks away outside the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino where officers and thousands of attendees at a country music concert were being sprayed with gunfire by an assailant whose location was not yet known.

Nearly two weeks later, Lombardo still doesn’t have the answers he has been seeking ever since, to the ‘how’ and, more important, the ‘why’ of the horrific attack. But at a press briefing Friday afternoon that clarified some of the events of that night, while raising new questions, the stoic lawman gave vent to some of the emotions that have been roiling him ever since.

As he approached the scene, Lombardo saw hundreds of people running for their lives up Las Vegas Boulevard and along the side streets and parking lots, some covered in blood. By then, the shooting had stopped, and his officers were closing in on the suspected gunman, later identified as Stephen Paddock, who was holed up on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay. But the horror was far from over. Lombardo’s radio crackled with word of casualties, including reports of dozens of lifeless bodies in and around the Route 91 Harvest Festival concert grounds and word that some of his responding officers were down, wounded by gunfire when Paddock apparently took aim at law enforcement responding to the scene. There were also reports, later dispelled, of shots being fired at other nearby casinos along the strip.

People scramble for shelter at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival after apparent gun fire was heard on Oct. 1, 2017 in Las Vegas. (Photo: David Becker/Getty Images)

Slideshow: Scenes from Las Vegas mass shooting >>>

For Lombardo, a 29-year veteran of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, it was the nightmare he had always feared, the one that he had tried to prepare his department for. He had methodically studied mass shootings, including the December 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., and the Pulse nightclub shooting last year in Orlando, to heed lessons for his own officers. He had even traveled to Mumbai, India, to study firsthand the 2008 terrorist attacks where 164 people were killed in a series of coordinated strikes against hotels and other public spaces— aware that terrorist groups had long mentioned Las Vegas as a possible target.

But one of his biggest concerns as sheriff, he told the Las Vegas Sun in 2015, was a “lone wolf” attacker. “The person here locally that is disgruntled with government, separatist, anarchist, those types of individuals,” Lombardo said.  Someone, he said, willing to act “on their own.”

As Lombardo later told reporters, even though his officers were doing everything they had been trained to do that Sunday night in reaction to a mass shooting event, nothing had fully prepared him or anyone to be confronted with this type of horror on their own doorstep.

“It just kept getting worse and worse,” Lombardo told KLAS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo listens to a question during a media briefing at Metro Police headquarters in Las Vegas Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2017. Investigators trying to figure out the Las Vegas gunman, Stephen Paddock’s state of mind have so far been stymied by the secret life he appeared to lead before the attack on a country music concert on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday. (Photo: Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)

In the nearly two weeks since Paddock broke the windows of his 32nd floor suite at Mandalay Bay and rained gunfire on roughly 22,000 concertgoers below, killing 58 and injuring more than 540, Lombardo has become the face of the ongoing investigation. Plain-spoken with a matter-of-fact delivery, the sheriff has been the primary conduit of information for his community and the television audience at large from around the world as people grapple for answers to why Paddock created such carnage.

Lombardo has won praise for his down-to-earth, even-keeled demeanor, and seems more forthcoming than other law enforcement officials, including the FBI, who have publicly spoken about the case. He has insisted on “telling the public what I know when I know it,” as he explains it, to “provide calmness in the community.”

While Lombardo has warned the media and others against speculation, he has been open about his own theories. He has repeatedly questioned how Paddock, a 64-year-old real estate investor and avid gambler, could have planned the attack with no one noticing or helping.

“Do you think all of this was accomplished on his own?” Lombardo said at a briefing last week. “Face value, you’ve got to make the assumption that he had to have help at some point.” He said “it would be hard for me to believe” that Paddock did all the preparations totally on his own.

The sheriff has also said he believes Paddock— who had 50 pounds of explosive material and another 1,600 rounds of ammunition in his car, parked in the casino’s garage — intended to escape. But he acknowledged that not everyone involved in the investigation agrees with him.

Drapes billow out of broken windows at the Mandalay Bay resort and casino on the Las Vegas Strip, following a deadly shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas. Police who have yet to find Stephen Paddock’s motive for the massacre said Friday, that they will enlist the public’s help.  (Photo: John Locher/AP)

Lombardo has not tried to conceal his own frustration with the pace of the investigation. After nearly two weeks police still have no clear motive for one of the worst mass shootings in American history. And as the mystery has deepened about Paddock, a 64-year-old real-estate investor and gambler with no record of mental illness, political or religious extremism, Lombardo has openly questioned whether a motive will ever be established.

“There’s a chance we may never know,” Lombardo told reporters this week. “There are questions that may never get answered.”

The investigation has cast a spotlight on Lombardo, who, according to those who know him, does not enjoy the limelight. Lombardo, 54, was born in Japan. His father, a sergeant in the Air Force, was transferred to Nellis Air Force Base in Vegas in 1976 when Lombardo was 14.

After high school, Lombardo joined the Army before enrolling at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where he got a civil engineering degree. But soon, he followed his father, who had retired from the Air Force and joined the Las Vegas police department, into law enforcement. Lombardo joined the Las Vegas police in 1988—and while working his way up the ranks, he graduated with a master’s degree in crisis management from UNLV and from the FBI National Academy, both in 2006.

In 2014, Lombardo, who is a Republican, ran for and was elected Clark County sheriff—a job that, unlike in other big cities, involves running both the sheriff’s department and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. More than 3,500 officers report to him, and his jurisdiction spans roughly 8,000 square miles—including the city of Las Vegas and the rest of Clark County, which extends nearly 100 miles east toward the Utah border and 100 miles south towards Arizona.

While much of the land is unsettled desert or farmland, it has not been without drama. In 2014, Lombardo, as assistant sheriff, was the lead tactical commander in responding to a standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters and officials with the Bureau of Land Management who had confiscated cattle Bundy had been grazing on federal land. Lombardo helped negotiate the release of cattle allowing the standoff to end peacefully.

Protesters gather at the Bureau of Land Management’s base camp, where cattle that were seized from rancher Cliven Bundy are being held, near Bunkerville, Nevada April 12, 2014. T (Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

As sheriff, Lombardo has grappled with restructuring a police department that has come under Justice Department scrutiny for its frequent police shootings and its relationship with the black community. In a high profile event over the summer, Seattle Seahawks player Michael Bennett accused Las Vegas police of targeting him in a traffic stop because he was black and of using excessive force. Lombardo has said his officers acted properly, but has allowed that more work needs to be done establishing trust between his department and the community.

But now Lombardo faces one of the biggest challenges of his career—heading up an investigation where a man appears to have taken deadly aim at people while leaving no obvious clues or explanation for why he did so. In the days since the Oct. 1 shooting, Lombardo has grown more and more outwardly frustrated in the search for Paddock’s motive.

“We still don’t know why,” Lombardo told reporters earlier this week. “And it’s not for a lack of trying.”

With that mystery comes increased scrutiny on other parts of the investigation—including on the police response to the shooting.

On Monday, Lombardo released a significantly revised timeline of the shooting, indicating that Paddock shot a hotel security guard six minutes before he started firing on concertgoers. The timeline, which was disputed by MGM Resorts, the owner of Mandalay Bay, raised questions about why it took police so long to locate the gunman, and a possible failure in communication between officers and Mandalay Bay, which presumably would have reported that one of their guards had been shot.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo discusses the Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department headquarters in Las Vegas. On Monday, Lombardo said Paddock shot and wounded the security guard outside his door and opened fire through his door around 9:59 p.m. – six minutes before shooting into the crowd. That was a different account from the one police gave last week: that Paddock shot the guard, Jesus Campos, after unleashing his barrage of fire on the crowd. (Photo: Erik Verduzco/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)

On Friday, Lombardo corrected the timeline once again—bristling at what he described as people in “cyberspace” questioning the integrity of not only his investigation, but his own personal integrity. “I provided you the information has I knew it, and everybody in here knew it was going to change,” he said, visibly irritated. “The dynamics of this investigation are far reaching. It’s wide. It’s huge, and you can’t expect exact answers in the early throws.”

In their initial account, police said the security guard, Jesus Campos, was shot around 10:15 p.m. — about 10 minutes into the attack — when Paddock discharged a volley of gunfire through the door of his room after seeing Campos approach on a baby monitor the shooter had placed on a room service cart. Police had originally portrayed Campos as a hero, telling reporters he had interrupted and stopped the killing, and alerted law enforcement about the location of Paddock’s room.

But on Monday, police said Campos, who was unarmed, was shot and wounded at 9:59 p.m. as he investigated an apparently unrelated alarm for an open door on the floor — six minutes before Paddock began firing out his window at 10:05. Police now say they have no idea why Paddock, who had a large quantity of ammunition and other loaded weapons in his room, stopped his rampage 10 minutes later.

Lombardo said Campos had alerted Mandalay Bay security that he had been shot, but police hunting for the gunman only learned this when they found him lying wounded in the hallway. By that time, Paddock had, for no known reason, stopped shooting.

According to the updated timeline released Monday, police officers reached the 31st floor of the resort and casino at 10:12 p.m. — where, they reported to colleagues, they could hear shots being fired above them. Officers reached the 32nd floor, where Paddock was staying in Room 135, at 10:17, two minutes after he stopped shooting. They found Campos a minute later, at 10:18 p.m., and the security guard pointed them to Paddock’s room. Police did not breach Paddock’s room until 11:20pm—over an hour later—where they found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

But that timeline was disputed by MGM Resorts, which released a statement Thursday saying the 9:59pm report was “not accurate.” “We know that shots were being fired at the festival lot at the same time as, or within 40 seconds after, the time Jesus Campos first reported that shots were fired over the radio,” the statement read. “Metro officers were together with armed Mandalay Bay security officers in the building when Campos first reported that shots were fired over the radio. These Metro officers and armed Mandalay Bay security officers immediately responded to the 32nd floor.”

Police run to cover at the scene of a shooting near the Mandalay Bay resort and casino on the Las Vegas Strip, Oct. 1, 2017, in Las Vegas. Multiple victims were being transported to hospitals after a shooting late Sunday at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. (Photo: John Locher/AP)

On Friday, Lombardo defended the revised timeline, specifically regarding the 9:59pm timeprint, but said “circumstances associated” with it had changed and the police timeline was was  “not in conflict” with the MGM Resorts statement. The sheriff explained that a “human entry” in a hotel security log provided to police had listed 9:59pm as the moment Campos had first encountered Paddock. But he said it now appears that the entry marked the time when Campos, attempting to reach the 32d floor, discovered that a stairwell door near Paddock’s room had been barricaded.

Unable to access the floor from that stairwell, Campos, according to Lombardo, took another route, and was actually shot at 10:05pm, about the same time when Paddock began taking aim at concertgoers outside his window.

But the sheriff did not clarify remaining questions, including what time Mandalay Bay officials alerted police that Campos had been shot or why it still took 12 minutes for cops to make it to the 32nd floor. On Friday, Lombardo repeated that Campos alerted security at Mandalay Bay of the gunfire—both via radio and his cell phone. But, uncharacteristically, he declined to take follow-up questions.

Lombardo, who has declined most national media requests except for an appearance on “60 Minutes” that aired last Sunday, was unapologetic about the changing facts of the case. And he pushed back against criticism that the shifting timeline was evidence of “incompetence” or “conspiracy” by his department.

“I am absolutely offended by that characterization,” he insisted. “There is no conspiracy… Nobody is attempting to hide anything.”

The details, he added, are likely to change again.

In the 12 days since the shooting, Lombardo says he hasn’t slept much. A few hours here, a few hours there—mostly on a ragged old couch in his office at police headquarters. He and others have been coming through more than 1,000 tips from the public, trying to answer the mystery behind why someone who had led an otherwise unremarkable life would suddenly become a mass killer.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, center, responds to a question during a media briefing at the Las Vegas Metro Police headquarters in Las Vegas, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP)

“Part of me losing sleep is, did I miss something? Did I fail to do something? Did my people fail to do something?” he told the Las Vegas Review Journal. “You immediately think you’re gonna know the reasons why in the short term. Now, here we are a week after the fact, and we still don’t know.”

On Friday, 12 days after the shooting, the sheriff looked and sounded exhausted. And after days of being matter-of-fact and in control, he became visibly emotional discussing officers who had selflessly run towards the scene to save lives, even as the bullets continued to rain down. Several officers, he said, he been severely wounded when Paddock began shooting at them as they drove up to the scene—a diversion that injured them, but likely saved the lives of others.

One of the officers, Brady Cook, had four gunshot wounds, including in the chest. “The reason I bring him up,” Lombardo said, choking back tears,” is because he asked me if he could come back to work today.”

The sheriff paused, trying to regain his composure. “Excuse me for my emotion,” he said, his voice quivering.

_____

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New details on Vegas shooting raise questions about police response

FILE – In this Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017 file photo, a Las Vegas police officer stands by a blocked off area near the Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas. On Sunday, Oct. 1, Stephen Paddock opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest Festival killing dozens and wounding hundreds. Paddock spent hours in casinos. and was known for betting big on video poker and staring down fellow gamblers. There is no indication, though, that any particular grievance set him off. But details that have surfaced so far about the one-time IRS agent and son of a notorious bank robber, are clues, at least, to his mindset. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

Las Vegas police offered new details Monday about the days and minutes leading up to last week’s deadly mass shooting, raising new questions about the police response and their investigation of the still-unexplained massacre.

In a significant revision to the original timeline of the Oct. 1 massacre, authorities revealed that Stephen Paddock shot a security guard in the hallway outside his Mandalay Bay suite six minutes before he opened fire out the window on concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, killing 58 and injuring nearly 500.

In their initial account, police said Jesus Campos, the guard, had been shot around 10:15 pm – about 10 minutes into the attack — when Paddock discharged a volley of gunfire through the door of his room after seeing Campos approach on a baby monitor the shooter had installed on a room service cart. They had portrayed Campos as a hero, telling reporters he had interrupted and stopped the killing and alerted law enforcement to the location of the room.

But on Monday, police said Campos, who was unarmed, had been shot and wounded at 9:59 pm as he investigated an apparently unrelated alarm for an “open door” on the floor, six minutes before Paddock began firing out his window at 10:05. Police now say they have no idea why Paddock, who had a large quantity of ammunition and other loaded weapons in his room, halted his rampage 10 minutes later.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Las Vegas sheriff Joseph Lombardo offered little explanation for the discrepancy in the original account, although he implied that Campos, who had been wounded and “extremely shaken up by what happened to him,” might have misremembered the details.

“As I have conveyed to you from the very beginning … in your zest for information and my zest to ensure the public’s safety and the calming of their minds … some things are going to change,” Lombardo said.

But the revised timeline raised new questions about why it took police so long to ascertain Paddock’s location, as they scrambled to figure out where the shooting was coming from.

Lombardo said Monday Campos had alerted Mandalay Bay security that he had been shot, but police hunting for the gunman only learned about it when they found him lying wounded in the hallway, after the gunman had stopped firing at concertgoers below.

According to the updated timeline released Monday, police officers reached the 31st floor of the resort casino at 10:12 pm—where they reported to colleagues that they could hear shots being fired above them. Officers reached the 32nd floor, where Paddock was staying in Room 135, at 10:17, two minutes after he stopped shooting. They encountered Campos one minute later, at 10:18pm, and the guard pointed them to Paddock’s room.

Police have offered no details on communications between their officers and officials at Mandalay Bay, who, presumably would have reported the shooting of one of their employees. MGM Resorts, who owns Mandalay Bay and several other casinos that Paddock frequented, has repeatedly declined to comment on the specifics of the incident, citing the ongoing investigation.

Officers did not enter the Paddock’s suite until 11:20 pm—more than an hour after he had fired his last shots. They found the shooter dead of what they have described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It’s unclear when Paddock shot himself or what he was doing in those 65 minutes. Lombardo has repeatedly said, and reiterated Monday, that he believes Paddock, who had 50 pounds of explosive material and another 1,600 rounds of ammunition in his car parked in the casino’s garage, intended to escape.

Police have defended that hour-long gap on the grounds that the shooting had already stopped and they wanted to safely evacuate nearby hotel guests before breaching Paddock’s room.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo discusses the Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department headquarters in Las Vegas, Monday, Oct. 9, 2017. Law enforcement authorities on Monday made a significant change to the timeline of the mass shooting, saying the gunman shot a hotel security guard before he opened fire on concertgoers. (Erik Verduzco/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)

Lombardo also acknowledged Monday that authorities had another key fact wrong. Paddock had checked in to Mandalay Bay on Sept. 25—three days earlier than originally reported. That means the 64-year-old gunman had been staying in the hotel for nearly a week before the Sunday night attack.

Witnesses have told police they spotted Paddock, a real estate investor and avid gambler with no history of violence, playing video poker, his game of choice, in the days leading up to the attack. Police say they have reviewed video footage from the casino, but have not revealed what it shows.

The latest revelations are likely to raise new questions about what employees saw and heard, and about other security measures at the hotel, where Paddock brought 23 guns, including long rifles, and thousands of rounds of ammunition into his room apparently without attracting attention.

And police have released new details from the scene that raise further questions about how Paddock operated undetected as he meticulously planned for his savage attack—apparently in full view of hotel security cameras that line the hallways of the resort.

In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes , officers responding to the scene said Paddock had apparently used power tools to construct a barricade on the door to the exit stairwell closest to his room, anticipating officers would likely use the route to gain entry to his floor.

“He had screwed shut the door–with a piece of metal and some screws,” Sgt. Joshua Bitsko, one of the responding officers, told 60 Minutes.

On Monday, Lombardo revealed that Paddock had also started drilling a hole next to the door of his suite in the hallway, but it wasn’t completed, and authorities were not sure what it was for.

Once the cops breached Paddock’s room, they found a room filled with ammunition and guns. “It just looked almost like a gun store,” Dave Newton, another officer who responded, told CBS. There were “all kinds of monitors and electrical equipment …a few phones …a couple of laptops. A lot of drills, drill bits, all kinds of tools.”

Officers also found a note with numbers that appeared to calculate the distance between the Route 91 site and Paddock’s window, as the gunman plotted the trajectory of his bullets. Lombardo also confirmed again Monday that Paddock also appeared to aim at two fuel tanks just beyond the concert site near the runway of the McCarran International Airport. The tanks were pierced by two bullets, but did not explode—averting even further tragedy for thousand of concertgoers who fled for their lives by running in that direction to escape the bullets.

More than a week after the attack, the revelations only seem to add to the mystery of why Paddock did what he did. Lombardo indicated that police were no closer to understanding a motive, in spite of cooperation from his friends and family—including his younger brother, Eric, who arrived in Vegas on Sunday to speak with authorities.

Though authorities have zeroed in on October 2016, the point when Paddock began assembling most of his arsenal for the attack, police still have yet to identify a “single event” that might have sent the gunman on a path to murder.

“I’m frustrated,” the sheriff acknowledged. “This individual purposely hid his actions leading up to this event, and it is difficult for us to find the answers to those actions.”