Texas church gunman had demanded cash before shooting, minister says
The man who shot and killed two people inside a Texas church on Sunday had visited the church several times before the shooting, the church's minister told The Christian Chronicle. Minister Britt Farmer said the gunman, Keith Thomas Kinnunen, 43, became angered when the church wouldn't give him money.
"We've helped him on several occasions with food," Farmer told the Chronicle. "He gets mad when we won't give him cash. He's been here on multiple occasions."
Kinnunen had been arrested multiple times since 2009, including weapons charges in Texas and New Jersey, according to the River Oaks Police Department.
Kinnunen attended the Sunday service at West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, dressed in a long black wig, a fake beard and a bulky jacket. His conspicuous appearance alarmed several parishioners and the church's security team, according to witnesses who spoke to the Chronicle.
Isabel Arreola, who sat feet away from the shooter with her seven-year-old daughter, told CBS News she got a bad feeling when she noticed the man sitting toward the back of the church.
"I don't feel comfortable. I said, 'He just, you know, is giving me a bad vibe,'" Arreola said. "I tell my husband, 'Let's go, give me my baby,' and I say, 'I gotta get her out of here.'"
Church officials also took notice of Kinnunen's behavior. The Chronicle reports that the church's security team began watching him at the start of the service.
"When he came in, he was under observation … this was (a case of) 'maybe it's nothing, but maybe it's worth looking into,'" church elder John Robertson, who mans the church's video room, told The Chronicle. "We had put him on isolation on one of the cameras back here so we could see that he was behaving at the moment."
"When he got up between the bread and the cup, or right after the prayer, we said, 'We need to make an intervention,'" Robertson said.
But before the team could intervene, Kinnunen took out a shotgun and opened fire. He killed two people, Richard White and Tony Wallace, before being fatally shot by Jack Wilson, a volunteer member of the church's security team.
"At that point the shooter I guess caught [me] out of the corner of his eye because I was walking down towards the front of the auditorium," Wilson told CBS News. "He then kind of halfway turned towards me and that's when I took the shot because I had a full frontal face."
"You train, but you hope you never have to go to that extreme. But if you do, your training will kick in, and that was evident yesterday."
The church began to increase its security after the 2017 shooting at another Texas church. Twenty-six people were killed by a gunman at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs. The gunman in that shooting died by suicide.
In September, a Texas bill went into effect that allows licensed handgun owners to carry firearms inside churches and places of worship. The state also passed SB 2065 in 2017, which waives state fees churches would have to pay by providing their own security team, which is what the West Freeway Church did.
Farmer told the Chronicle that anywhere from 25 to 30 parishioners now carry concealed handguns on any given Sunday.
Mireya Villarreal contributed to this report.
