A federal judge ruled the United States Air Force is mostly responsible for the 2017 mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, court records filed on Tuesday show.
Devin Patrick Kelley killed 26 people and wounded 22 others when he opened fire at the Sutherland Springs Baptist Church congregation on Nov. 5, 2017. He killed himself shortly after the shooting, which was declared the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez in San Antonio ruled on Tuesday that the Air Force is 60% responsible for the shooting because it failed to enter Kelley’s criminal history into a federal background check database for gun sales, court records indicated.
“The trial conclusively established that no other individual — not even Kelley’s own parents or partners — knew as much as the United States about the violence that Devin Kelley had threatened to commit and was capable of committing,” part of Rodriguez’s 99-page ruling read, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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“Moreover, the evidence shows that — had the Government done its job and properly reported Kelley’s information into the background check system — it is more likely than not that Kelley would have been deterred from carrying out the Church shooting,” Rodriguez added.
The 26-year-old gunman, who was a former airman, had a string of legal troubles beginning in at least 2012, when he was court-martialed and sentenced to a year in military prison for assaulting his wife and child. Kelley was discharged for misconduct in 2014.
In 2017, Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman, confirmed to the Washington Examiner that “Kelley’s domestic violence offense was not entered into the National Criminal Information Center database by the Holloman Air Force Base Office of Special Investigations.”
Families of victims from the shooting began suing the government later that year following the Air Force’s admission that it failed to send the FBI information about Kelley, specifically regarding his domestic violence conviction in 2012.
The Texas Supreme Court ruled on June 25 that survivors and families of the victims cannot sue the gun retailer that sold the weapon to Kelley.
On Tuesday, Rodriguez ordered parties involved to set a trial plan within 15 days to investigate the appropriate monetary damages for survivors’ and victims’ families in the case.
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The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas and the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
