This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The Texas church shooting was captured on a video that shows the gunman methodically shooting his victims in the head, including small children, it was reported on Wednesday.



The seven-minute video clip described to the New York Times by an unnamed law enforcement official echoes interviews with survivors who described the shooter going aisle by aisle and firing at close range.

The First Baptist church in Sutherland Springs often recorded its services and posted them online.

The attack during a service last Sunday killed 25 people, as well as an unborn child, and wounded 20.

US military consistently fails to report domestic violence to gun database, senators say Read more

The shooter, 26-year-old Devin Kelley, was wounded by two shots from a civilian as he left the church. The civilian and another man chased Kelley’s SUV in another car. After several miles, Kelley’s car crashed and he was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Police said they recovered two handguns belonging to him in addition to a rifle.

In a Tuesday briefing an FBI agent said that investigators were trying to unlock Kelley’s cellphone in a search for clues about his motive. Texas police have said that there was an ongoing “domestic situation” that included Kelley’s sending threatening texts to his mother-in-law, who had attended the church in the past but was not present on Sunday. Kelley went to the church’s annual fall festival only five days before the shooting, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Details have also emerged about Kelley’s mental health problems and criminal history. He made death threats to his superiors and escaped from a psychiatric facility in 2012, when he was stationed at a US air force base in New Mexico, and was later sentenced to a year in military prison for assaulting his first wife and young stepson.

The Senate judiciary committee will hold a hearing on “firearm accessory regulation and enforcing federal and state reporting to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System” on 14 November.

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After a gunman killed 58 people in Las Vegas on 1 October there were calls to ban “bump stocks”, which increase the firing rate of semi-automatic rifles.

On Monday the US air force acknowledged that it failed to record Kelley’s domestic violence conviction in a criminal history database, meaning he was not flagged and stopped from buying four firearms between 2014 and 2017.

Two senators said on Tuesday that the US military had a widespread problem that went far beyond the failure to report the Texas suspect’s domestic violence records.

Jeff Flake said there had been only a single domestic violence record submitted from the armed services to the background checks system since 2007.

“Unless we’re to assume there’s been only been one case of domestic violence in the military over that point of time, we have a problem. We have a loophole here that needs to be closed,” said Flake.