If you read only one story today, read this swell Michael J. Mooney profile of Stephen Willeford, the man who stopped the Sutherland Springs shooter with his own AR-15, one year after the incident.
As he approached the old white chapel, he screamed as loud as he could, “Hey!” To this day, he’s not sure why—he knows that giving away your position is foolish, tactically—but friends inside the church later told him that when the gunman heard Willeford’s cry, he stopped shooting and headed for the front door. “It was the Holy Spirit calling the demon out of the church,” he tells people.
Just as Willeford reached the front yard of Fred and Kathleen Curnow, whose house faces the church entrance, a man wearing black body armor and a helmet with a visor emerged from the church. Willeford scrambled behind the front tire of Fred’s Dodge Ram. The gunman raised his pistol and fired three times. One bullet hit the truck. One hit the Dodge Challenger parked behind him. One hit the house.
Willeford propped his AR-15 on the pickup’s hood and peered through the sight. He could see a holographic red dot on the man’s chest. He fired twice. He wasn’t sure he’d hit him, though he was later told that the man had contusions on his chest and abdomen consistent with getting shot while wearing body armor. Regardless, the gunman stopped shooting and ran for a white Ford Explorer that was idling outside the chapel, roughly twenty yards from where Willeford had positioned himself.
As the shooter rounded the front of the Explorer, Willeford noticed that the man’s vest didn’t cover the sides of his torso. Willeford fired twice more, striking the man once beneath the arm—in an unprotected spot—and once in the thigh.
The man leaped into the vehicle, slammed the door, and fired twice through the driver’s side window. Willeford aimed for where he thought his target’s head would be and pulled the trigger, shattering the driver’s side window completely. The Explorer sped away, turning north onto FM 539, and Willeford ran into the street and got off another shot, this time shattering the SUV’s rear window.
Snip.
Willeford believes that what happened that day was a battle between good and evil. He says he was terrified, but he thinks the calm he experienced was the Holy Spirit taking over. He tells people he thinks it was the Lord’s hand shielding him as the man doing evil fired over and over again in his direction. And looking back now, he feels like God had been shaping him every day of his life, carving him into the perfect tool for that day.
He grew up with a deeply rooted love for his community, a devotion that was instilled in him by previous generations. During the Depression, his great-grandfather started a trade route between Sutherland Springs and Seguin, bolstering business and helping farmers and shopkeepers in both towns stay afloat through hard times. Growing up, Willeford worked at a local dairy owned by his family. “I squeezed more tits before I was eight than you will your whole life,” he likes to joke.
He started shooting when he was 5 years old. His father had him aiming a bolt-action .22 rifle at Coke cans in the backyard. As he grew older, he was drawn to competition shooting. By his mid-thirties, he could hit the string of a moving balloon from a hundred yards away. With his instruction, all three of his kids, who range in age from 23 to 28, were expert pistol shooters by the time they turned 9. For years, his family’s Church of Christ Bible study group met at a local gun range, gathering each week to shoot for a few hours before going over Scripture.
He’d even had discussions with a police officer friend, long before his encounter with the gunman, about where to aim on a moving target wearing body armor: the side, the hip, the leg. More preparation from God, he believes.
There was a stretch in his life, starting in 1993, when he felt like the Old Testament character Job. On the day before Willeford’s thirty-first birthday, his parents were both killed by a drunk driver. They’d been out for a Labor Day motorcycle ride when a man with four prior DWIs collided with them head-on. The accident was on FM 539, not far from where he and Langendorff concluded their chase. A few weeks later, an arsonist burned down his parents’ house—before he’d had time to sort through his childhood memories.
The day after his parents’ funeral, he and Pam learned she was pregnant. But during a second-trimester checkup, there was no heartbeat. And not long after that, Willeford lost his job. “We maintained our faith through all of it, though,” he says.
So Willeford is “no stranger to pain,” he says, but he remembers crying more the first week after the shooting than he had the rest of his life combined. The first time came on the side of the road, when he was talking to officers. Everything was just so overwhelming.
He was at the scene for four hours, answering questions from various agencies. Because the chase had crossed county lines and because officers from several different jurisdictions responded, Willeford had to tell his story to representatives from three county sheriffs.Then there was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. And then the Texas Rangers. (Later that night, he’d have to repeat it all over again to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.)
Snip.
All he ever prayed for was a simple life. He wanted only to be a faithful man, a good husband and father, an upstanding member of the rural community where his family has resided for seven generations. He finds it strange to be constantly thanked for—and reminded of—one of the most painful experiences of his life. He says he can’t wait for a whole day to pass when it never comes up. He doesn’t consider himself a hero. The word makes him uncomfortable.
“If you’re breaking it down into heroes and survivors, I’d rather be with the survivors,” he says. “I got shot at too.”
Read the whole thing.
