A gunman drove a vehicle into a Michigan church, opened fire and set the building ablaze, police say. Photo / Bill Pugliano, Getty Images
A gunman drove a vehicle into a Michigan church, opened fire and set the building ablaze, police say. Photo / Bill Pugliano, Getty Images
The man who officials said crashed a vehicle into a United States church and opened fire on the congregation has been identified by police as a 40-year-old from Burton, Michigan, who went to high school nearby and served in the Marines.
Authorities said they believed the man, identified as ThomasJacob Sanford, also intentionally set fire to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints building in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan. They added that congregants were inside attending services when the building was engulfed in flames on Monday (NZ time).
The shooter was “neutralised” in an exchange of gunfire with responding officers, police said. Four of those in the church also died. Two died of gunshot wounds, police said, and two more bodies were found later in the church. Eight people were wounded.
Chief William Renye of the Grand Blanc Township Police Department did not provide a motive for the attack.
Records show the gunman, who also went by the name of Jake, graduated from a nearby high school in 2004. He served in the Marines from 2004-08 and was deployed to Iraq from 2007-08.
Sanford’s father declined to comment. Several attempts to reach the suspect’s wife and other immediate family members were unsuccessful.
Church members and residents shortly after the shooting and fire at a Michigan church on Monday (NZ time). Photo / Emily Elconin, Getty Images
Ryan Lopez, a former high school classmate who lives in the nearby city of Davison, Michigan, said he regularly saw Sanford around town and was still trying to process the news. He said he last saw Sanford at a gym in Davison a few weeks earlier and that nothing had seemed out of the ordinary.
“He was happy to see me, he just seemed normal,” Lopez said. Sanford was an avid hunter of geese, turkey and deer and had seemed like a typical “country kid” while growing up, Lopez said. After high school, both men joined the Marines, where Sanford did motor transport work, Lopez said.
For about a year around 2010, Sandra Winter, 56, rented a room to Sanford in her home in Jeremy Ranch, Utah. She described him as an unassuming man who worked for a local business doing snow removal and landscaping. He also had creative ambitions as a sculpture artist working with Sheetrock, Winter said.
She was shocked to hear he was identified as the attacker in the shooting, a situation she said she would “never in a million years” have imagined.
In 2016, he married a woman who had gone to the same high school he did, according to court records, and they have a 10-year-old son.
April Van, 66, who lives in an apartment complex near the suspect’s most recent address, said she did not know him but she had seen the son taking out trash.
Another neighbour, Randy Thronson, 71, said he hadn’t talked to Sanford for about two years but he “seemed like a nice guy” and would plough neighbours’ driveways in the winter for free.
“Something must have happened, snapped somehow,” he said as police secured the area around the suspect’s home.
