A newly uncovered El Paso police report has revealed that the gunman who killed 26 at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Sunday once escaped from a psychiatric hospital after making death threats and trying to smuggle weapons onto an Air Force base.
The gunman, David Kelley, had been checked into the mental health facility in 2012 after beating his wife and stepson while stationed at a New Mexico Air Force base. Months after the assault, as he was awaiting his appearance in the military court, he escaped and made it all the way to a bus station in downtown El Paso, a few miles away from the hospital, before the police caught him.
In the police report from the episode, the person who reported Kelley’s escape warned that Kelley “suffered from mental disorders,” and the report concluded Kelley was “a danger to himself and others.” He “was attempting to carry out death threats” against his superiors in the military and had been caught smuggling guns onto his base, according to the report, which was published by the Houston television station KPRC.
Five months after the attempted escape, he pleaded guilty to the charges of beating his wife and stepson and was court-martialed and sentenced to a year of confinement.
After being released, Kelley was able to buy more guns, an oversight that resulted from the Air Force failing to report Kelley’s criminal past to an FBI database that would have made him unable to pass a background check.
President Trump has said that the shooting was a result of mental health problems in the country and not gun laws. The vast majority of people with mental illnesses, however, are not violent, and we do not know what the “mental disorders” mentioned in the report might have been and so we cannot conclude his time in a mental health facility had anything to do with his violence. His previous history of domestic violence, however, fits the profile for mass murderers.
