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() A man who survived a shooting at a church in Michigan on Sunday tells he believed he would die.
Paul Kirby joined “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” to explain how and his family survived after suspected shooter, 40-year-old Thomas Jacob Sanford of Burton, Mich., drove his vehicle into the front of a Latter-day Saints church before opening fire on churchgoers.
Four people were killed and eight others injured in a shooting and fire at a church in Grand Blanc Township around 10:30 a.m. Sunday. Two people are still in critical condition. The patients in the hospital are as young as 6 and as old as 78.
Sanford died after a shootout with law enforcement.
“We heard a loud boom and the back wall of the chapel just kind of buckled inwards. The whole building shook. Several people got up and started running out. Some of us went out thinking that it was just a car that ran off the road,” Kirby said.
Some in the congregation went to help the driver, believing he had accidentally run off the road and into the church.
“When I saw the gunman just start shooting people, I don’t know how many people were out there before me, but several of them got shot, and he started shooting at me. So I turned around and started running for the door,” Kirby said.
“I never thought I would have made it through the doors alive, because a bullet came past me and hit the glass door on my left side about a foot away from me,” he added.
Kirby’s wife and two sons, aged 14 and 12, were in the chapel at the time the truck hit the building. They were all able to vacate the premises. He says now is not the time for America to be divided and focused on political point-scoring amid the tragedy.
“Everybody wants to make things political … It doesn’t matter. It just divides us even more. We can’t have this happening. [We] can’t be dividing the nation over this. We’ve got to come together and change minds, bring people closer together.”