Texas shooting: suspect’s violent criminal history was not flagged

Devin Patrick Kelley, responsible for shooting and killing 26 people and injuring 20 more in a church shooting on Monday had a violent history

(Photo: NY Daily News)
(Photo: NY Daily News)

Over the course of nearly a year, Devin Patrick Kelley, the alleged Sutherland Springs church shooter, hit, kicked and choked his wife.

He also allegedly threatened her multiple times with loaded and unloaded firearms.

Kelley pleaded guilty to hitting their stepson, a young child, so hard that the blows put his life in danger, according to legal documents.

In 2012, Kelley, an airman at the Holloman air force base in New Mexico, was convicted by a court-martial on two charges of domestic assault and sentenced to a year of confinement. The domestic violence convictions were serious enough that, according to an air force spokesperson, he should have been prohibited from buying or owning firearms.

Devin Patrick Kelley, who was identified as the gunman (Photo: the Toronto Star)
Devin Patrick Kelley, who was identified as the gunman (Photo: the Toronto Star)

The Holloman Air Force base office of special investigations did not enter the record of conviction for brutal domestic abuse into the national background check system, which gun sellers use, at least according to “initial information,” said Ann Stefanek, an air force spokesperson in a statement on Monday.

Kelley left the air force in 2014 with a bad conduct discharge, but Geoffrey Corn, a military law expert at South Texas College of Law, said this alone would not have been enough to bar him from gun ownership.

On Monday, law enforcement officials said that Kelley went on to buy at least four guns, two in Colorado and two in Texas, in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.

On Sunday, Kelley opened fire on a church during morning services, killing 26 people, many of them children, and wounding 20 more as they sat in the pews in a rural Texas town.

Officials said there were early indications that the shooting was motivated by a domestic dispute. The youngest murder victim was roughly 18 months old, officials said.

A Ruger AR-15-style rifle was recovered at the church, and two handguns from the shooter’s car.

The air force office of the inspector general and the defense department’s inspector general will conduct a “complete review” of the Kelley case, Stefanek said, as well as a “comprehensive review” of air force records to determine whether other cases have been reported correctly.

After high-profile mass shootings in the past decade, the Nics background check database has repeatedly come under scrutiny for faulty reporting, missing records, and bad procedures, including after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting and the 2015 white supremacist attack on a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Advocates have led campaigns to correct failures to report the appropriate state mental health records into the background check system.

“We don’t have a good system now,” Jeff Flake, a Republican senator who has voted against gun control measures in the past, said in a CNN interview earlier on Monday, already raising concerns about the NICS system. “We need better information sharing, if nothing else.”

Asked during a press conference in Seoul if he would consider “extreme vetting” for gun purchases, as he as for immigration, Donald Trump said it would not have prevented the mass shooting in Texas.

“You look at the city with the strongest gun laws, Chicago, and Chicago is a disaster, a total disaster,” Trump said, a claim that has been proven to be incorrect.