Not every baby in the church cried. One was still in the womb, killed along with its mother, Crystal Holcombe. She was one of nine Holcombe family members murdered, including the little one inside her.
In Spanish, Ramirez explained that the gunman started with the crew in charge of the camera and audio area.
He then moved into the center aisle, toward those at the front of the stage with the music crew. Aisle by aisle, he continued to shoot. He would open fire point-blank on babies who cried…
Ramirez said he remembered making eye contact with the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter, who was crying out for help. He signaled with his finger for her to be quiet, because the gunman sought anyone who made a sound and killed them.
The pastor’s daughter, Annabelle, ended up murdered too. Ramirez and his wife made it out only because they played dead, a skill unavailable to crying infants. It appears as though Devin Kelley had resolved not to leave anyone alive if he could help it, no matter how small. Cops estimate that he fired a minimum of 450 rounds.
Today brings news of yet another red flag in his past: At one point while he was facing military charges for assaulting his wife and infant son, he snuck out of a mental facility and headed for the border. For a time, this guy was, quite literally, an escaped mental patient.
El Paso police arrested Devin Kelley on June 7, 2012, at a Greyhound bus station a stone’s throw from the U.S.-Mexico border after he escaped the Peak Behavioral Health Services facility about 12 miles away in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, according to the police report…
Sunland Park police officers, who were looking for Kelley after his escape, told El Paso police officers that Kelley “suffered from mental disorders and had plans to run” from the mental hospital and “take a bus out of state,” according to the El Paso police report.
Sunland Park officers told their Texas colleagues that Kelley “was a danger to himself and others as he had already been caught sneaking firearms” onto Holloman Air Force Base and that Kelley “was attempting to carry out death threats that [he] had made on his military chain of command,” the report states.
Now we know, I guess, that he was in fact mentally ill, not just a man with volcanic rage. The Air Force couldn’t have picked a worse character to have slip through the cracks in its reporting to the NICS database.
Here’s an interview with the survivors followed by one with local hero Stephen Willeford, the NRA member who exchanged gunshots with Kelley as he was leaving the church, then flagged down another local hero, Johnnie Langendorff, and followed Kelley in hot pursuit until he drove into a ditch. By the time the cops arrived, Kelley was already dead. They found three gun wounds on him, one self-inflicted and two by Willeford — one in the torso, one in the leg. If Willeford hadn’t engaged this degenerate, God only knows where he would have ended up. Another church?
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