VESTAVIA HILLS, Ala. –
Police investigating a shooting at an Alabama church that killed two people and injured another said Friday that the shooter was a 71-year-old man who occasionally attended services.
Police Captain Shane Ware did not identify the suspect, who was arrested after the shooting on Thursday night at St Stephen’s Episcopal Church in the Birmingham suburb of Vestavia Hills. Ware said prosecutors were preparing orders to charge him with capital murder.
Ware said the man pulled out a gun and opened fire during a dinner attended by other church members. He killed an 84-year-old man and a 75-year-old woman, and injured another woman, before a person in the room detained the gunman and detained him until police arrived.
Rev. Rebecca Bridges, the church’s associate rector, led an online prayer service on the church’s Facebook page Friday morning. He prayed not only for the victims and church members who witnessed the shooting, but also “for the person who perpetrated the shooting.”
“We pray that you work in this person’s heart,” Bridges said. “And we pray that you will help us to forgive.”
Bridges, now in London, alluded to other recent mass shootings as he prayed for elected officials in Washington and Alabama “to see what has happened in St. Stephens and Uvalde and Buffalo and so many other places and their hearts change. minds will open. “
“And that our culture will change and our laws will change in a way that will protect us all,” he added.
There were several high-profile shootings in May and June, beginning with a May 14 racist attack that killed 10 black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The following week, a gunman massacred 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Thursday’s shooting came just over a month after one person was killed and five were injured when a man opened fire on Taiwanese parishioners at a church in Southern California. It has been almost seven years since a white supremacist confessed to killing nine people while studying the Bible at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Officers from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Office of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives joined investigators at the scene, which was cordoned off Friday with yellow police tape and police vehicles with flashing lights blocking the path to the church.
People gathered and prayed nearby in the hours after the shooting.
“It simply came to our notice then. St. Stephen is a community built on love, prayer, and grace, and they will come together, “Rev. Kelley Hudlow, an Episcopal priest of the Diocese of Alabama, told WBRC.” People of all religions they come together to pray for healing. “
He said messages of support were coming in from all over the United States and the world. “We need everyone out there. Pray, think, meditate and send love to this community because we will need everything,” he said.
On Saturday, thousands of people gathered in the United States and at the National Mall in Washington, DC, to renew calls for stricter gun control measures. Survivors of mass shootings and other incidents of armed violence pressured lawmakers and testified on Capitol Hill earlier this month.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey issued a statement Thursday afternoon lamenting what she called the shocking and tragic loss of life. Although she said she was happy to know that the suspect was in custody, she wrote: “This should never happen: in a church, in a shop, in the city or anywhere.”
Vestavia Hills is a residential community in southeast Birmingham, one of Alabama’s two most populous cities.