'Every morning I could hear a lot of gunfire': Texas gunman's neighbours speak after massacre

A local resident said he had noticed something unsettling after Devin Kelley’s family moved in

The residents of New Braunfels, where Texas church shooter Devin Patrick Kelley lived, are happy to talk about their “quiet” neighbourhood. Few had seen the 26-year-old around before his rampage that left 26 dead and 20 injured, but one thing did jump out to some – the morning gunfire.

“Everybody around here is pretty much to themselves... Quiet,” neighbour Robin Gonzales told The Independent. But Ms Gonzales’s father, Robert, said he had noticed something unsettling recently.

“Every morning when I would go out to the front of my house ... I could hear a lot of gunfire in that direction. It felt like it was next door,” he said.

Mr Gonzales said the gunfire would start as early as 8am, and occasionally sounded like it was coming from an assault rifle.

“It just kept going on,” Mr Gonzales recalled. “He would go crazy all the way to 12pm. I thought it was target practice.”

Authorities are still trying to pin down an exact motive for the mass shooting, which happened about 35 miles away from New Braunfels, at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. Officials say the attack may have stemmed from a “domestic situation” within the Kelley family, rather than a racial or religious motivation.

The street where the Kelleys live is usually quiet. It’s what Texans call a “farm to market” road – a country road located just outside the city limits. Kelley’s home sits atop a winding, paved road that is largely obscured by trees. On Monday afternoon it was also surrounded by several sheriff's cars parked outside.

Neighbour Denie Woods said she, too, had heard gunshots in the area, but that it never surprised her. Opening the door to her one-story house tucked away in the woods, she said: “You hear gunshots all the time out here in the boonies.”

But Ms Gonzales, who moved to the area with her parents in 1992, said the neighbourhood is changing.

“When I was a kid it was quiet," she said. "We only had one Walmart, one small HEB supermarket ... Eventually it’s going to become a metroplex area like Dallas Fort Worth."

Ms Gonzales is concerned about all the people moving into the area – "mainly from California," she says – and worries that there won't be enough water to go around. The shooting, however, hasn’t affected her thoughts on the neighbourhood.

“There are people that will do these things," she said. "You don’t expect it, you don’t know who they are.”

Authorities struggled at first to find a link between Kelley's home in suburban New Braunfels and the 400-person town he terrorised on Sunday. Now, they believe they've found one in his in-laws, who are members of the Sutherland Springs church.

Freeman Martin, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Kelley had sent threatening text messages to his mother-in-law before the shooting.

“There was a domestic situation going on within the family and the in-laws,” Mr Martin said. “The mother-in-law attended the church ... she had received threatening text messages from him.”

But Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt said the family members were not in the church during Kelley's attack.

“I heard that [the in-laws] attended church from time to time,” he said. “Not on a regular basis.”

Summit Vacation Resort, where Kelley worked before the mass shooting (Emily Shugerman/The Independent)

Employees at the Summit Vacation Resort in New Braunfels, where Kelley worked as a security guard, said they never expected this kind of violence from their co-worker.

Manager Claudia Varjabedian told The Independent that Kelley had worked at the resort – which consists of about a dozen cabins and an RV campground – for five weeks before the shooting.

“We hardly saw him," she said. "We don’t know a doggone thing about him.”

Kelley usually worked the morning shift, from 4am to 12pm. He would pick up his list of duties each morning, Ms Varjabedian said, and make his rounds quietly. Her only complaint was that Kelley seemed almost too focused – he rarely cracked a smile.

“He wasn’t very personable," noted Theresa Reed, who works in the resort reservation office. "He was very quiet."

But neither woman said they suspected Kelley to be capable of violence. Asked if she saw anything that would have foreshadowed the attack, Ms Varjabedian said: "There was nothing".

Outside the office, on the wooded, rural road where the resort sits, a red-and-white banner hung near the entrance.

"Now hiring," it read.