The residents of New Braunfels, where Texas church shooter Devin Patrick Kelley resided, are happy to talk about their “quiet” neighbourhood. Few had seen the 26-year-old around before his rampage that left 26 dead and 20 injured, but one thing did jump out to some – the morning gunfire.
“Everybody around here is pretty much to themselves ... Quiet,” neighbour Robin Gonzales told The Independent. But Ms Gonzales’s father, Robert, said he had noticed something unsettling after Kelley’s family moved in.
“Every morning when I would go out to the front of my house ... I could hear a lot of gunfire in that direction. It felt like it was next door,” he said.
Mr Gonzales said the gunfire would start as early as 8am, and occasionally sounded like it was coming from an assault rifle.
“It just kept going on,” Mr Gonzales recalled. “He would go crazy all the way to 12pm. I thought it was target practice.”
Authorities are still trying to pin down an exact motive for the mass shooting, which occured at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs about 35 miles away from New Braunfels. Officials say the attack involved a “domestic situation” within the Kelley family, rather than a racial or religious motivation.
As well as the Ruger AR-556 rifle found at the church, two more handguns were found in the vehicle Kelley drove before he died shortly after the shooting: a Glock 9mm and a Ruger .22-calibre. Both had been purchased by Kelley.
The street where Mr Gonzales and the Kelleys live is usually quiet. It’s what Texans call a “farm to market” road – a country road located just outside the suburban town of New Braunfels. Kelley’s home sits atop a winding, paved road that is largely obscured by trees. On Monday afternoon it was also surrounded by several sheriffs cars parked outside. Some of the properties nearby are vacant, while others house small farms with roosters and horses.
Neighbour Denie Woods said she, too, had heard gunshots in the area, but that it never surprised her. Opening the door to her wooded, one-story house on Monday, she said: “You hear gunshots all the time out here in the boonies.”
But Robin Gonzales, who moved to the areas as a child with her parents in 1992, she the neighbourhood is changing.
“When I was a kid it was quiet, we only had one Walmart, one small HEB supermarket ... Eventually it’s going to become a metroplex area like Dallas Fort Worth."
She added: “Growing up here there’s a concern ... With everyone coming in, if there’s going to be enough water to go around, for instance.”
The shooting hasn’t effected her view of the area, however.
“There are people that will do these things," she said. "You don’t expect it, you don’t know who they are.”
Authorities have struggled to find al link between Kelley's home in New Braunfels, and the 400-person town he terrorised on Sunday. Now, they belief they've found one in his in-laws, who are members of the Sutherland Springs church. Freeman Martin, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Kelley had sent threatening text messages to his mother-in-law before the shooting.
“There was a domestic situation going on within the family and the in-laws,” Mr Martin said. “The mother-in-law attended the church ... she had received threatening text messages from him.”
Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt said the family members were not in the church during Kelley's attack. “I heard that [the in-laws] attended church from time to time,” Sheriff Tackitt said. “Not on a regular basis.”
But employees at the Summit Vacation Resort in New Braunfels, where Kelley worked as a security guard, said they never expected this kind of violence from their co-worker.
Manager Claudia Varjabedian told The Independent that Kelley had worked at the resort – which consists of about a dozen cabins and an RV campground – for five weeks before the shooting.
“We hardly saw him," she said. "We don’t know a doggone thing about him.”
Kelley usually worked the morning shift, from 4am to 12pm. He would come in an pick up his list of duties each morning, Ms Varjabedian said, and make his rounds quietly. The only complaint she ever received was that Kelley seemed almost too focused – he rarely cracked a smile.
“He wasn’t very personable," noted Theresa Reed, who works in the resort reservation office. "He was very quiet."
But neither woman said they suspected Kelley to be capable of violence. Asked if she saw anything that would have foreshadowed the attack, Ms Varjabedian said: "There was nothing".
Outside the office, on the wooded, rural road where the resort sits, a read-and-white banner hung near the entrance.
"Now hiring," it read.
