‘That Man Just Shot Up the Church, We Have to Stop Him’

His daughter came into the house and said there was shooting at the church up the road.
He went to the safe, took out his rifle, loaded it, and ran outside without stopping to put on shoes.

His name is Stephen Willeford. In November 2017 he was 55, a plumber, a former firearms instructor, living in the small town of Sutherland Springs, Texas, across an open field from the First Baptist Church.

On the morning of November 5, a man in body armor and a tactical vest walked into that church during the Sunday service and opened fire with a rifle. He killed 26 people, the youngest of them a small child and the oldest 77, and wounded about 20 more. It was, and remains, the deadliest mass shooting at a place of worship in American history.

Willeford was at home when his daughter heard the gunfire and told him.

He did not have a plan. He had a rifle, a handful of loose cartridges he loaded on the move, and no shoes. He ran toward the sound.

He came out near the church as the gunman was leaving it. The two of them saw each other across the street and started shooting.

Willeford used a neighbor’s vehicle for cover. He hit the gunman twice, once in the leg and once in the torso, in a gap in the body armor. The man dropped his rifle, got into his SUV, and sped off.

Willeford ran into the road. A pickup truck was stopped at the intersection, driven by a 27-year-old named Johnnie Langendorff, who had no idea what was happening. Willeford got in and said, that man just shot up the church, we have to stop him.

They chased the SUV for about eleven miles at speeds near 95 miles an hour, with Langendorff on the phone to a 911 dispatcher the whole way, calling out the turns. The gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, eventually lost control and went off the road. When officers arrived, they found him dead in the vehicle.

Investigators later concluded the wounds Willeford inflicted, and the pursuit that kept the man from stopping anywhere else, ended the attack.

A Texas grand jury reviewed the shooting and declined to bring any charge against Willeford. The Texas Senate passed a formal resolution recognizing what he did. He and Langendorff were named finalists for the state’s Texan of the Year. Sheriffs and prosecutors said plainly that without the barefoot man with the rifle, the toll that day would have climbed higher.

Willeford has never seemed to want the attention. He has talked about the weight of it, about the people inside the church he could not reach in time, about how there is no version of that Sunday he walks away from feeling like he won anything.

Consider the moment his daughter came through the door. He was a middle-aged plumber standing in his own house, and the safe, sane thing was to lock the doors and wait for the police.

Instead he loaded a rifle and ran across a field toward a man who had just killed dozens of people.

He got there. He drew the gunman’s fire onto himself and away from the church. And when the man ran, he did not let him drive away into another town with a loaded weapon and a head start.

A congregation was nearly wiped out that morning. The people who lived through it did so, in part, because a neighbor heard the shots and ran the wrong way up the road, without shoes, because there was no time to find them.

I was three hours away when I first received a phone call from a county official indicating what had occurred. By the time I was on my way, federal, state and local emergency responders and law enforcement were already responding in droves. I visited the site and the replacement church for funerals and worship events since then. The citizens of this community are salt of the earth type people. God Bless these families