'There were so many rounds': Restaurant owner saw Texas shooter fire on church
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, TEXAS — Terrie Smith, the owner of Theresa’s Kitchen, which advertises “fresh homemade breakfast tacos,” stood against a brick railing in front of her store, dressed in blue jeans and a black top, kneading turquoise rosary beads in her hands.
Her restaurant inside the S S Express convenience store is directly across the street from the First Baptist Church, where 25 people were killed Sunday in the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history. Among the dead was a pregnant woman whose unborn child also died.
Smith was in the parking lot when the shooting began not long after the 11 a.m. church service began.
“I started yelling, ‘Get down, get down!’ ” Smith said Monday morning, her sobs choking off her words. “We heard the shots go off. There were so many rounds. You just heard them constantly."
The shots were sporadic at first. Then Smith saw the gunman, dressed all in black, shaking as he fired his rifle, she said.
"When he was shooting around the building, first there were shots and then there was a silence, and then you heard a hundred shots and then there was another little silence — and that’s when he was running out and you could hear more shots. It sounded like a machine gun," Smith said.
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“All I could think of was getting the customers on the ground to safety. We fell on the ground, and we just kind of crawled back to the doors.
"When we got in, we locked ourselves in and you could see him coming around the other side, and he was just shooting toward the building."
A wounded man ran out of the church and headed toward the convenience store where Smith and others were hiding, she said.
"He was running this way and he was all bloody from his arms and his face, and he was running as fast as he could, and we let him in and he said, ‘Somebody went in and they shot everybody. My family is in there,' " Smith said. "And he fell to the ground right there."
As Smith spoke, FBI investigators plumbed the high grass just beyond the church with metal detectors.
Two men and a woman stood across the street, their arms raised and their voices loud in prayer. Their black T-shirts were emblazoned with a Bible verse, Matthew 5:14:
"You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden."
Smith spoke again.
"I knew everybody in that church," she said. "We all know each other here. We're a good community."
About 100 yards up the road, on the right side of the road, just beyond the sign on U.S. 87 that welcomes visitors to Sutherland Springs, stood a large pink triangular sign. It had two words on it: Incident ahead.
The road took a slight rise and, almost immediately, the first TV truck came into sight. Then another. And another. And another. Both sides of the highway were lined with cars, trucks and vans.
Hundreds of reporters gathered at the town's lone intersection between the S S Express on one side of the road and the VP Racing Fuels convenience store on the other.
Cameras focused beyond the yellow crime scene tape on the small white building just ahead. The sign at the First Baptist Church read, “Join Us Fall Fest Oct. 31, 6 to 8 pm.”
SEE ALSO:Texas shooting: Every confirmed victim so far
The air was thick and humid.
As the sun crept higher into the sky Monday, the few neighborhoods in Sutherland Springs were protected by police tape. Businesses were quiet, other than members of the media buying bottles of water.
Just one customer was in the Dollar General Store a little after 11 a.m., and the Christmas display with the hanging “Merry Christmas” sign was undisturbed.
The Sutherland Springs Tire and Battery store had a large white sign out front that read, “Now Open.” But its front gate was closed and padlocked.
Just after 1 p.m., three young men started planting white metal crosses in the grass in front of the Racing Fuels convenience store. The flag at half-staff at the United States Post Office gently tilted in their direction, as if to point out what they were doing.
When they were done and the 26 crosses — one to represent each victim — were planted, Sheree Rumph stopped at the first cross to pray.
She stood there a few seconds, her head bowed and hands clasped. She moved on to the next cross, and the cross after that, and when she had prayed over all 26 crosses, she lifted her head and wiped her eyes.
“I’m here just to pray for the city,” said Rumph, a San Antonio resident. “The word of God tells us to unite in times like this. So I’m here with some other churches, and we just came to pray, to love on the city and to love on the people that were affected.”
A few feet away from Rumph a light-brown teddy bear lay gently on the grass next to a candle and 12 long-stemmed roses. The orange ribbon wrapped around the bear read, “love and support.”
Smith said, "We've always taken care of each other. We'll take care of each other now."
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