“It was as if he had been released,” said Susan Salin, 73. Sallin was sitting at the same table at “Boomers Potluck” with the three people who lost their lives in the shootings Thursday night at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Vestavia Hills, Alabama. The suspected gunman had previously attended church services and some church gatherings for people of the Baby Boomer generation and above, but did not appear to be interacting much with others, he said. That night, he sat alone at a table. While the wine was available in the potluck, he drank from what looked like a small bottle of Scotch and avoided invitations to join others. “I personally invited him to come and sit at our table twice because I wanted him to feel a sense of inclusion, but he did not come,” Sallin said. He said that a woman, whose husband would be killed a few moments later in the shooting, “realized that he had not made a plate and went and offered to make him a plate”. He denied that too. Robert Fidley Smith, 70, is accused of manslaughter in the shooting that killed three people. Walter Bartlett Rainey, 84, Sarah Yeager, 75, of Pelham, and another woman were killed in the shooting. Police did not release the name of the third victim, but friends referred to her as Jane. The gathering was joyful, as friends – who had not been able to gather so much during the pandemic – chatted about the food in front of them that night, their favorite cars and other light topics. Sallin said she did not remember hearing any quarrels or heated conversations before the shootings broke out. “I heard this loud metal sound and thought a metal chair had fallen to the floor. “And then another sound was heard and another sound, and I realized it was a weapon,” he recalls. “People dived to the floor. I was diving for the floor. “When I went down to the floor, I realized that two of my friends who were sitting at the table with me had been hit.” Sallin said she crawled to the floor to reach her friends. “I was trying to calm them down and caress them and say, ‘You are not alone. You are not alone.’ That was the message I wanted to get. “ Nearby, Linda Foster Rainey was hugging her husband. According to a statement from the family, “he died in her arms while she murmured words of consolation and love in his ears.” Sallin said one of the men in the group, who is also in his 70s, managed to subdue the gunman. “I saw him take the gun from the man’s hand and hit him in the head with the gun,” he said. The Reverend Doug Carpenter, pastor of St. Stephen for three decades before retiring in 2005, said he realized the man had hit the gunman with a folding chair before crushing him to the ground and taking the gun. “The suspect, in my opinion, was a hero,” Vestavia Hills Police Captain Shane Ware told reporters at a news conference on Friday, adding that the act was “extremely critical to saving lives.” ». The church had been closed for several days as a crime scene, but the church returned on Sunday for worship services with a message to choose love over hate. The Most Reverend John Burruss, the Rector of St. Stephen, referred to the Christian history of the Last Supper, where Jesus called the friend who would eventually betray him. “There is no doubt in my mind that Bart and Sharon and Jane would invite their Judas again and again to sit down and share a meal, because they knew the unconditional love of God,” he said, using the first names that went the three victims. with. “It was their guiding ethos and they fully embodied it. “They taught us that everyone is welcome at the table,” Burruss said.
