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Texas gunman driven by domestic tiff

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Sutherland Springs: The gunman who murdered 26 people at a Texas church on Sunday is believed to have been driven by a “domestic” dispute, officials said.


“This was not racially motivated, it wasn’t over religious beliefs.


There was a domestic situation going on with the family and in-laws,” Freeman Martin, regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told a news conference.


“The suspect’s mother-in-law attended this church,” he said, adding that 26-year-old shooter Devin Patrick Kelley had sent “threatening texts” prior to the mass shooting.


Kelley walked into the white-steepled First Baptist Church in rural Sutherland Springs carrying an assault rifle and wearing black tactical gear, then opened fire during a Sunday prayer service. He wounded at least 20 others, officials said.


After he left the church, two local residents, one of whom was armed, chased him in their vehicles and exchanged gunfire, and Kelley crashed his car and shot himself, dying of his wounds, Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt told CBS News in an interview on Monday morning.


“At this time we believe that he had a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Tackitt said.


Tackitt said Kelley’s in-laws sometimes attended services at First Baptist, which was cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape on Monday morning.


“I heard that they attended church from time to time,” Tackitt told Reuters.”Not on a regular basis.”


The attack came a little more than a month after a gunman killed 58 people in Las Vegas in the deadliest shooting by a sole gunman in US history.


The initial death toll matched the fatalities at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a man shot and killed 26 children and educators and his mother before taking his own life in December 2012.


Those attacks now stand as the fourth deadliest by a single gunman in the United States. Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott told CBS there was evidence that Kelley had mental health problems and that he had been denied a Texas gun permit.


“It’s clear this is a person who had violent tendencies, who had some challenges, and someone who was a powder keg, seeming waiting to go off,” Abbott said. Abbott and other Republican leaders were quick to say that the attack did not influence their support of gun ownership by US citizens — the right to bear arms protected under the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.


“This isn’t a guns situation. I mean we could go into it but it’s a little bit soon to go into it,” US President Donald Trump told reporters while on trip to Asia.”But fortunately somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise... it would have been much worse. But this is a mental health problem at the highest level.” Democrats renewed their call to restrict gun ownership following the attack.


“How many more people must die at churches or concerts or schools before we stop letting the @NRA control this country’s gun policies,” Democratic US Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Twitter.


The victims in Sutherland Springs, a community of fewer than 400 people, located about 40 miles (65 km) east of San Antonio, included the 14-year-old daughter of church pastor Frank Pomeroy, the family told several television stations. — Reuters


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