On most Sunday mornings, Willeford would have been 45 minutes away, in San Antonio, at the Church of Christ he and his family had attended since his kids were young. But on November 5, 2017, he decided to stay home and rest up. He was scheduled to be on call the upcoming week at San Antonio’s University Hospital, and he knew he’d inevitably be summoned for a middle-of-the-night plumbing emergency. He had drifted to sleep sometime before 11:30 a.m. when his oldest daughter, Stephanie, came into his bedroom and woke him up. She asked if he heard gunfire.
He did hear something, but to Willeford it sounded like someone was tapping on the window. He looked outside but didn’t see anyone. He pulled on a pair of jeans and went to the living room, where the walls were less insulated. The sound was louder there. It was definitely gunfire, he realized, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
He rushed into a back room and opened his steel gun safe, where he stows his collection of pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Without hesitation, he snatched one of his AR-15s. He’d put the rifle together himself, swapping out parts and upgrading here and there over the years. It was light, good for mobility, and could shoot quickly. It wasn’t as accurate as some of his other rifles but good enough to hit the bowling pins he and his friends used for targets. He loaded a handful of rounds into the magazine.
Meanwhile, Stephanie had jumped in her car to drive around the block to investigate. Willeford’s neighborhood, in central Sutherland Springs, consists of modest ranch-style homes and trailers. The town itself is tiny, about six hundred people, a blue-collar agricultural community. Stephanie returned a minute or so later. She told her father she had seen a man wearing black tactical gear at the Baptist church just down the street, about 150 yards away.
Willeford and his family know almost everyone who attends the church. Some of the elder members of the congregation knew his great-grandparents. Each Christmas, he rides his Harley with a motorcycle group from the church that delivers toys to poor kids across the county.
He called his wife, Pam, who was five miles away, drywalling the house the family was building for their youngest daughter, Rachel, who was almost three months pregnant at the time, and her husband. Willeford told Pam that there was an active shooter at the church and asked her to stay put. The last thing he heard before hanging up was her pleading, “Don’t go over there!”
Then he barreled out the front door, down the street toward the church. He didn’t even bother to put shoes on.
Stephanie tried to follow, but he turned and asked her to go back inside and load another magazine for him (he wanted to give her a task so she wouldn’t leave the house).
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.
The vehicle roared out of view. For a moment, it seemed he had gotten away. Then Willeford looked to his left and noticed a navy-blue Dodge Ram stopped at a nearby crossroad.
Johnnie Langendorff, a 27-year-old who had driven down from Seguin, thirty minutes north, that morning to visit his girlfriend, had arrived at the intersection across the street from the church just as the gunman walked out and began firing at Willeford. Langendorff had already dialed 911 when Willeford, whom he’d never met, ran toward him, barefoot and brandishing a warm AR-15.
“That guy just shot up the church,” Willeford shouted. “We need to stop him.”
The next thing Willeford remembers hearing was the sound of Langendorff’s doors unlocking. He hopped in the truck, and they sped after the Explorer.
Going north from Sutherland Springs, FM 539 is a two-lane blacktop that winds around craggy hills, through open pastures, past a handful of ranch houses toward Guadalupe County. As they raced after the Explorer, Langendorff topped 90 miles per hour, overtaking four or five other cars along the way. He stayed on the phone with the 911 dispatcher and updated their location every time they passed a cross street. They’d traveled seven or eight miles when they came around a bend and, for the first time, spotted the Explorer a few hundred feet ahead.
“If we catch him, we may have to put him off the road,” Willeford said.
Langendorff nodded. “I already figured that.”
As they closed in on the SUV, it swerved back and forth across both lanes and then, abruptly, careered off the road into a ditch. Langendorff pulled up about five yards behind the Explorer. Willeford clutched the AR-15 in his right hand— he only had two rounds remaining, not enough to survive another shootout—and reached down to open the door with his left. Just as he was stepping out, the Explorer peeled off, plowing through a street sign on its way back to the road. Willeford closed his door. Langendorff stomped on the gas. The SUV made it only a few hundred yards before veering off the road, smashing through a fence, and rolling to a stop roughly thirty feet into a field.
Langendorff put the truck in park on the road, about fifty yards from the Explorer. Willeford told Langendorff to duck under the dash as he, for the second time in a span of ten minutes, posted up behind the front tire of a Dodge Ram, perching his rifle on the hood. He screamed at the man in the SUV, who didn’t budge or utter a sound. (He says he isn’t proud of the language he used that day, that he was angry in the moment.) He’s not sure how long he stayed there before hearing the voice of a police officer on a PA behind him.
“Driver, put down your weapon and come out with your hands up,” Willeford remembers the officer saying. When the officer repeated himself, Willeford laid his rifle on the hood and turned toward the squad car.
“Not you!” the officer shouted.
Soon, other officers arrived. To Willeford’s recollection, there were a dozen, at least, from jurisdictions all over the area. Rather than assault the vehicle, they decided to dispatch a drone to inspect the SUV for any movement inside. An officer arrived with the drone after nearly an hour, and through its camera they could see that the gunman was dead in the driver’s seat. Willeford watched as the officers cautiously converged on the Explorer, until they were close enough to peer through the window. The fatal wound was a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.
