Sutherland Springs

ON A FALL AFTERNOON in Austin, a Sunday, I was sitting at a table in a large, crowded tent at the Texas Book Festival signing copies of a book I'd written called Hometown Texas. The book was a collection of my columns about small-town Texas that appear weekly in the Houston Chronicle. From near the tail end of the line, my daughter Kate walked up.

"Did you hear about the shooting?" she asked.

I had not. I wasn't sure what she was talking about, because what we have come to call mass shootings have become so depressingly familiar in this country, it's hard to keep up with the most recent. This one had happened just a few hours earlier, Kate said. In Texas. She hadn't caught exactly where, although she thought it was a small town near San Antonio.

After my signing chores, I walked to my car and headed eastward toward Houston, tuning in CNN on satellite radio for the three-hour drive home. A small Texas town, I heard. A Baptist church. Multiple deaths. Sutherland Springs. It was November 5, 2017.

Despite decades of writing about Texas, including about many unlikely and overlooked people and places in my native state, I had never written about Sutherland Springs. I had written about the small Central Texas town of Hillsboro, where in the early 1930s, my Uncle Joe—I'm his namesake—had ended up in a jail cell with Raymond Hamilton, one of Bonnie and Clyde's drivers. That Joe Holley had been incarcerated for stealing chickens to feed his family; Hamilton had robbed a jewelry store and killed the owner.

I had written about the venerable opera house in Nacogdoches, where in 1907 a musical quartet of young vaudeville performers calling themselves the Four Nightingales were upstaged by a runaway mule; that bizarre incident prompted the Nightingales (actually the Marx brothers) to realize they were comedians, not musicians.

I had written about cowboy poets in Alpine, buffalo soldiers in Fort Davis, the author of the longest novel in the English language in Waco, and a tinkerer in the picturesque German community of Fredericksburg who may have invented the airplane in the mid-1800s.

I had written about the rascally old Indian fighter/Texas Ranger Bigfoot Wallace—who called his trusty rifle "Sweet Lips"—and the tiny South Texas town named in his honor. Not Wallace. Bigfoot. My mother was the Bigfoot High School valedictorian, class of 1932. Most small Texas towns were replete with the three Ps—place, people, and a colorful past—and I was familiar with dozens of them. Sutherland Springs was only about sixty-five miles northeast of Bigfoot, but not only had I never written about the place, I had never heard of it, had never noticed it on a map. As I would come to find out, it was easy to miss.

As I listened to increasingly grim and distressing reports as I drove, an old reporter's instinct kicked in. I had to go find out. I took the I-35 toward San Antonio, eighty miles southward.

A little more than an hour later, I looped around San Antonio's suburban fringe, a network of subdivisions and strip centers, and turned southeast along a two-lane blacktop through gently rolling pastureland dotted with mesquite and mottes of live oak. I passed cattle grazing, occasionally horses, fields of baled hay. Brick or stone ranch-style houses set away from the road behind wire fencing were attractive and well kept. Giant they were not. They appeared to be country getaways or maybe ranchettes, small cattle operations that retirees or refugees from the city operated. It was rural South Texas, pleasant enough but nothing spectacular, nothing out of the ordinary.

Sutherland Springs is not really a town but an unincorporated community bisected by a busy highway. Traffic ignores the blinking yellow light. Sutherland Springs has no downtown business district, no school, no noticeable landmark. (It does have a colorful history, but I didn't know that at the time.)

The sun set as I drove. Crossing narrow, tree-lined Cibolo Creek and heading up a slight incline, I passed a Sutherland Springs city limits sign. I slowed to a crawl as knots of people loomed out of the darkness. Huge satellite trucks and police vehicles, red lights flashing, crowded the highway. Rubberneckers spilled into the blinking-light intersection of state Highway 87 and Farm Road 539. A sheriff's deputy in a western hat and reflective vest directed motorists unaccustomed to slowing down.

I parked along a street of modest frame houses and ramshackle mobile homes a couple of blocks from the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, the site a few hours earlier of the worst mass shooting in modern Texas history. The small, boxy building, its exterior walls clad in weathered white siding, its wooden front door positioned under a squat steeple, was bathed in harsh light brighter than a summer day's. Yellow crime scene tape kept the curious out of the front yard.

In the post office parking lot across the highway from the church, a middle-aged Hispanic man wearing all black was conducting a candlelight prayer vigil. "I propose that we make a pact that in this small town that evil will not prevail," he was saying as I walked up. Recorded gospel music played from a speaker on the ground nearby.

Mike Gonzales, the man conducting the service (a retired Army warrant officer with two tours of duty in Iraq, he would tell me later), was surrounded by dozens of men, women, and children holding candles, clutching each other and sobbing. Surrounding the inner circle was a ring of reporters with notebooks and iPhones, photographers jostling for shots, and cameramen maneuvering bulky equipment.

"I mean, you hear about Vegas," a middle-aged man said in a quiet voice, speaking to himself as much as to me, "but when it's a stone's throw from your house…" He looked down at the ground and shook his head. "It's so quiet here. It doesn't happen here." (Just a few weeks earlier in Las Vegas, more than fifty people had been killed and more than five hundred injured when a gunman in a high-rise hotel room opened fire on an outdoor concert below.)

As the impromptu service continued, I was careful not to step in front of a slender gray-haired man in a blue polo shirt and khakis who sat in a wheelchair beside me. He was holding high a candle in a plastic cup. It took me a second to realize I was standing beside Texas governor Greg Abbott, who seemed to be alone in the crowd. Years earlier, a tree limb had fallen on him as he jogged along a residential street in Houston. He has been a paraplegic ever since.

As Gonzales continued to speak, I glanced across the road at the little church, now surrounded by portable fencing. Bright lights illuminated police officers and investigators going about their business. I tried to take in the horror of what had happened inside the white frame building that morning. I tried to imagine swarms of bullets from a military-style assault rifle burrowing into bodies of helpless men, women, and children as they prayed and sang hymns of praise. What had happened was beyond imagining. In time I would come to know the details.

That evening I didn't know Ryland Ward, a five-year-old boy who miraculously survived being shot numerous times at point-blank range. I didn't know Kris Workman, the church's young praise team director, shot in the back and instantly paralyzed from the waist down. Both were in the hospital that Sunday evening—the little boy fighting to stay alive; the active young man, a former college tennis player and dirt-track race car driver, undergoing surgery and contemplating life with useless legs. I didn't know that at that very moment numerous family members were still waiting at a church a couple of miles up the road—waiting to hear from authorities whether their loved ones were alive or dead.

I didn't know Sherri Pomeroy, the pastor's soft-spoken wife, who, with her husband Frank, had lost beloved Annabelle, their dark-haired, dark-eyed fourteen-year-old. Friends would recall that the teenager was always smiling. I didn't know Sarah Slavin, a young woman with dyed-purple hair who lost nine members of her family, or her sister-in-law Jennifer Holcombe, whose infant daughter was shot and killed as she held the little girl. I didn't know David Colbath, who lay on the floor as the shooter buried the muzzle of his assault rifle into his back and pulled the trigger. I knew none of the people I would come to appreciate and respect in the ensuing weeks and months.

Journalists by the nature of our work parachute in to the site of a tragedy or a natural disaster; we stay for a day or so, notebooks, cameras, and tape recorders at the ready; and then take off for the next big story. We briefly meet people like Sarah Slavin and Sherri Pomeroy, and then we move on. But they do not move on. Their heartache does not heal in a day or a week or a month. Neither do their physical wounds. As in Newtown and Charleston and Las Vegas and Orlando and Santa Fe and Pittsburgh and El Paso—and other sites from an ever-lengthening list—in Sutherland Springs lives were forever changed that November morning.

Glancing back at the governor on that warm evening, I remembered a Facebook ad he had posted in 2013, shortly before he announced his running for the state's highest office. Abbott was the Texas attorney general at the time. The ad, designed to assuage any doubts the state's hard-right Republican base might harbor about him, was anything but subtle. It featured a semiautomatic pistol lying next to a well-thumbed Bible.

"Two things every American should know how to use," the ad proclaimed in block letters beneath the gun and Bible. "Neither of which are taught in schools."

I know the governor. He is a congenial man in person. I admired him for showing up unannounced that evening in Sutherland Springs and not claiming the spotlight. I had been less than admiring in a series of Houston Chronicle editorials I had written throughout the year about guns and the Texas gun culture, work that had been honored a few months earlier with a Pulitzer Prize nomination. The editorials usually explored policy; in the little church across the road, policy was secondary. People had suffered and died in that invaded sanctuary.

In the editorials, I had chided the governor about the Facebook ad and about the relentless crusade he and his allies had launched in the Texas legislature to make firearms ubiquitous and unregulated. In my reporting and research, nonetheless, I sought to understand a belief among many of my fellow Texans that was almost religious in its depth and intensity, a belief in the sanctity of a sophisticated machine crafted to kill, a belief that Abbott proudly shared. "Gundamentalism" is the word that retired Presbyterian minister James Atwood coined to describe the almost mystical hold that grips Second Amendment absolutists.

In Sutherland Springs, faith in guns had collided with faith in God. Defenseless Christians, many of them ardent gun owners themselves, had become collateral damage in a holy war.

Twenty-six people died that morning less than a hundred yards from where I stood next to the governor. Twenty more were wounded. Paradoxically, we would soon learn that a gun-wielding "hero" may have saved many of the survivors from being slaughtered. Months later, that same hero, a soft-spoken plumber and certified National Rifle Association instructor, used his vast personal gun collection to give me a gun tutorial in the living room of his home across the road from the church. "All I ask is that you don't make me look bad," he requested.

I assured him that I wouldn't—and I won't. But I would try to understand him and others like him, men and women devoted to their guns, despite the mortal peril the misuse of guns has unleashed in this country.

As the prayers and hymns continued that autumn evening, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I instinctively stepped aside, thinking it was a cameraman angling for a better view of the governor. It turned out to be my son Pete, a reporter for the Washington Post. Back home in Texas for the weekend to attend a family reunion, he had been at the gathering for all of ten minutes when he got the call from the Post news desk to head to a place he, too, had never heard of.

Despite the fact that he wore a Washington Post "Democracy Dies in Darkness" T-shirt on his foray into fervid-red Texas, I was proud to watch him work. It's not often that father and son cover a story together.

I realized I was fortunate. I had seen two of my kids that day, both grown and on their own. Thinking as a father helped me feel, viscerally, the depth of loss the people of Sutherland Springs were trying to comprehend. Pete and I, along with hundreds of journalists from around the world, now presumed to tell their story. We had descended on an unassuming little town at a time when residents and church members were trying to cope with almost unimaginable horror. I'd been in similar situations—covering a rarely remembered mass shooting in a Fort Worth church twenty years earlier, reporting on the little town of West, Texas, after a 2013 fertilizer plant explosion—but to intrude on people's grief and sorrow never gets easy.

In an article that ran a couple of weeks after the shooting, reporter Lauren McGaughy of the Dallas Morning News described knocking on the door of a home near the church. She introduced herself to members of the Ward family, just returned from the hospital and awaiting news about four relatives—three kids (including Ryland, the five-year-old) and their mother. They invited her in.

"Maybe they opened up because they trusted me, or it was a welcome distraction," Lauren recalled. "Maybe it was just luck and timing. Whatever the reason, I wrote their story sitting at their kitchen table.…I decided to choose my interactions carefully. But I was still there, a stranger, an outsider, my presence an intrusion." (Two of the youngsters died, as did their mother.)

Most reporters feel a similar unease in such situations—I know I do—and yet driving home through the dark countryside that night, I decided I would stay a while. I banked on getting to know the people I would write about and allowing them to get to know me. I realized it would take more than a quick interview at the local Dairy Queen (if Sutherland Springs had a Dairy Queen) to reach the heart of the story.

I suspected that Sutherland Springs had something to tell us all about the epidemic of mass shootings in this country and the culture of fear those shootings engender. Maybe what happened in that little church on a Sunday morning—the Lord's Day, Pastor Frank Pomeroy often reminds his parishioners—would reveal something about this nation's trust in guns, about the tenets of fundamentalist Christianity that tolerate such trust, and about everyday life in twenty-first-century rural America at a time when urban and rural, red and blue, old and young seem irrevocably estranged. Sutherland Springs could have been any one of dozens of American communities that have suffered through a mass shooting. I hoped it would be possible to connect this unprepossessing little place, its concreteness and specificity, to larger discussions and debate and perhaps mutual understanding.

Adam Winkler, a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), law professor who writes about America's gun culture (Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America), has suggested that Texas might be the prototype for an armed America, with no controls, no limits on our Second Amendment freedoms. Winkler posited that the nation, with a newly installed conservative majority on the US Supreme Court, might be only a ruling away from that National Rifle Association (NRA) ideal. I wondered whether a tiny community no one had ever heard of was the American future in microcosm.

Although I knew nothing about Sutherland Springs, I knew its people in a way. I am, in fact, a native Texan who grew up in a small, working-class community near Waco (where folks might have owned a shotgun or a .22 for dove hunting, but not an assault rifle, or rifles). Like the residents whose lives revolve around their faith, I was deeply involved as a youngster with my extended family's fundamentalist church. We, too, believed in the Bible, literally.

I would come to learn, from that first evening, that the people of Sutherland Springs are people of deep, even desperate, faith. Would their faith sustain them in the face of grievous loss? Despite my own early immersion in fundamentalist Christianity, I was confounded initially by what seemed to be their unquestioning trust and acceptance. I simply couldn't believe what they were telling me. Surely, they were deluding themselves. Surely, rage, however impotent, would have been a more appropriate response.

When I expressed my skepticism and befuddlement to my old friend Robert Abzug, a historian who heads the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, he reminded me that many Holocaust survivors rejected their faith once they set about rebuilding their shattered lives. Dismayed and disillusioned, they could not imagine paying homage to a God who would allow such horror to happen.

Wouldn't a similar disillusionment set in among the people of Sutherland Springs? They professed to accept with equanimity, with all-embracing faith, what had happened to them. How could that be, I wondered.

For more than a year—from the night of the shooting until the first anniversary—I attended Sunday morning services and Thursday evening Bible classes, visited in homes, shared meals at Baldy's Diner and elsewhere. I asked impertinent questions, probed for deep and honest responses, gently urged men and women who didn't really know the guy with the reporter's notebook to revisit—indeed, to re-create for me—the most painful experience of their lives. I'm grateful that most were willing to help, and I deeply appreciate their trust. I also understand that some I asked simply could not. I do understand.

Three hundred or so miles northeast of Sutherland Springs is a little Piney Woods town near the Louisiana line called New London. About the same size as Sutherland Springs, it's known—if it's known at all these days—for one thing: On a March afternoon in 1937, a gas explosion destroyed the New London public school. Walls collapsed and the roof fell in, burying victims in a mass of brick, steel, and concrete debris. Of the 500 students and 40 teachers in the building that afternoon, nearly 300 died. Only about 130 youngsters escaped serious injury. To this day, the town commemorates its loss.

Chances are, the little town of Sutherland Springs will be remembered eight decades from now, a century from now—if it's remembered at all—for what happened on a Sunday morning in the fall of 2017. Travelers in their self-driving cars on Highway 87 will repeat the story as they pass by. Reporters now and then will offer up anniversary retellings.

Pastor Frank insisted otherwise. The First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs will be a city set on a hill, he proclaimed from the pulpit on a Sunday morning not long after the tragedy. It will be known for turning evil into good, known for good works among the community. As he spoke—prophesying, if you will—his people said amen. On that Sunday morning, as on every Sunday morning, the prophet wore a pistol on his hip.