A woman who was inside a Michigan church when her father and three other people were killed says she and the gunman locked eyes during the chaos and she was able to look into his soul, seeing his pain and a feeling of being lost. She said she instantly forgave him “with my heart.”
“He let me live,” Lisa Louis, 45, wrote.
A photo of a handwritten statement that Louis wrote was posted on Facebook. She described how she encountered the shooter and she also made a plea to the public for peace.
“Fear breeds anger, anger breeds hate, hate breeds suffering,” Louis wrote. “If we can stop the hate we can stop the suffering. But stopping the hate takes all of us.”
Thomas “Jake” Sanford, 40, rammed his pickup truck into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel in Grand Blanc Township, near Flint, on Sunday, shot at the congregation and destroyed the building with fire, police said. Police killed him at the scene.
Friends said Sanford had expressed hatred toward the Mormon church, as it is commonly known, after living in Utah and returning to Michigan years ago. Utah is the home state of the church.
Louis said she was kneeling next to her mortally wounded father, Craig Hayden, 72, when Sanford approached and asked a question.
“I never took my eyes off his eyes, something happened, I saw pain, he felt lost,” Louis wrote. “I deeply felt it with every fiber of my being. I forgave him, I forgave him right there, not in words, but with my heart.”
She also wrote: “I saw into his soul and he saw into mine. He let me live.”
Louis declined to be interviewed by The Associated Press. Her brother-in-law, Terry Green, wrote on Facebook that he believes her interactions with the gunman “bought precious time for others to escape.”
Besides Hayden, William “Pat” Howard and John Bond also were killed. The shooter’s fourth victim has not been publicly identified. Eight people were wounded.
Meanwhile, a different church said Wednesday that Sanford tried to have his 10-year-old son baptized there on Sept. 21 and was upset when he was turned down.
Sanford did not threaten staff at The River Church in Goodrich, but he was “frustrated,” Caleb Combs, an elder, told the AP. “You could see his agitation. … He wanted it done.”
Church staff tried to get a grasp of the boy’s belief in Jesus Christ but “came to the conclusion their son was unable to understand what he was doing,” Combs said.
Sanford and his wife did not regularly attend the church, Combs said, but had held an event there 10 years ago to raise money for the boy’s medical care. He was born with a health condition that produced abnormally high levels of insulin.
