A YOUNG GUNMAN who killed four people in two attacks at a church and at a mission training school in Colorado last Sunday had wanted to kill as many Christians as possible, he said on a website between the attacks.
The gunman, Matthew Murray, aged 24, also wounded five people in the attacks, which were separated by 12 hours and 65 miles. The first attack was around midnight on Sunday, local time, at Youth With A Mission (YWAM), a missionary training centre in a Denver suburb. Mr Murray shot four people in a dormitory, killing two of them.
He then travelled to the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, where YWAM has an office. There he shot dead two sisters, aged 16 and 18, in the church car park. Three others were wounded, including the sisters’ father.
Mr Murray was shot dead by a guard, Jeanne Assam, one of the church’s 15 security officers. The senior pastor, Brady Brown, said at a press conference on Monday that security at the church had been stepped up after news of the earlier attack.
“Because we took extra precautions, we saved a lot of lives yesterday,” he said. “There could have been a great loss of life yesterday, and she probably saved over 100 lives. He had enough ammunition on him to cause a lot of damage.” The church was offering trauma counselling to those who witnessed the shootings.
Ms Assam told reporters that she prayed to the Holy Spirit to guide her, and that she “knew [she] was the one given the assignment to stop this thing. . . It seemed like it was me, the gunman, and God.”
A news agency reported that Mr Murray had been raised in a deeply religious household. Mr Murray was found to have made several posts on a website for people who have left Evangelical organisations, in the last of which he said he wanted to kill and injure as many Christians as he could.