Tragedy Revisited: 25 Years After the Wedgwood Baptist Church Shooting

It's a date many of us remember vividly, a date etched into our lives. That was the night 47-year-old Larry Gene Ashbrook walked into Wedgwood Baptist Church on Whitman Avenue and, wielding a 9-millimeter Ruger and .380-caliber AMT pistol, began shooting those around him.

Less than 10 minutes later, one of the darkest chapters in our city's history had been written: seven people were dead, three adults, four teenagers — a mass shooting before the term had even been coined; seven others were wounded. The eighth fatality was Ashbrook, who shot himself in the head as those in the church fled, hid, or stood in defiance of the chaos unfolding before them. Ashbrook, who left no suicide note but had exhibited erratic behavior in the weeks and days leading up to the shooting, took any motive he may have had to the grave.

Twenty-five years later, many of those whose lives were permanently transformed by the attack — the city's deadliest mass shooting, then and now — spoke with Fort Worth Magazine about what they experienced that night and in the days to come, and how the events of Sept. 15, 1999 shaped their lives — and challenged, but ultimately strengthened, their faith.

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On the night of the shooting, a police scanner alert jolted news reporter Jim Douglas from his desk at WFAA's Fort Worth bureau, prompting him and photojournalist Russ Bauman to rush to the scene.

Jim Douglas: I clearly recall Russ speeding down I-35 as we listened to an officer inside the church call on the radio for more and more ambulances. We still did not know what had happened at the church, although I think we did hear police say a gunman was dead. We knew something horrible was unfolding, but we really had no idea what we were facing.

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The church was hosting a youth-oriented prayer and worship event that featured North Texas Christian rock band 40 Days, a popular group led by twin brothers Mark and Joel Warren.

Mark Warren: The event was called See You at the Pole, where on the National Day of Prayer students gathered around the flagpoles of their campuses to pray together. Then, around the country on that Wednesday night, students gathered to pray and worship. We were invited by Jay Fannin, Wedgwood's student pastor at the time, to come and lead worship at the church. We met Jay and the youth group at a camp the previous summer. This was our first time on the church campus.

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About 6:45 p.m., Ashbrook entered the church's south entrance, wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. Church employee Jeff Laster approached him, with the intent of asking him to put out his cigarette.

Jeff Laster: There was a group of us inside, some made up from the choir. The choir was rehearsing later that night. We saw him park his car. We saw him get out. We saw him walking around the grounds. He was walking toward the entrance where we were when someone in our group noticed he was smoking a cigarette. As he opened the door, I was getting ready to extend my arm out to shake his hand and to say something like, "Welcome to our church. Would you mind putting your cigarette out?" Before I could say anything, he looked right at me and said, "Is this where that damn religious meeting is being held?" and then he pulled out a gun and shot me twice. He then walked past me and turned to the person beside me, Sydney Browning, who was my best friend, and shot her three times, killing her.

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When the sound of gunshots began ringing out, many in the church thought it was part of the event.

Debbie Gillette, administrative assistant: The concert hadn't been going on very long when I heard the gunfire, but I thought it was part of a skit. A few seconds later, our youth minister came running into the office and said, "Call the police; they're shooting my kids." I tried to pick up the phone, but every line was busy. We had six lines. People had gone to different parts of the building to call the police. I was desperate. My daughter was sitting on the front row.

Guided by the voices and music emitting from the concert, Ashbrook entered the main audience chamber, where the event was taking place, and continued to shoot.

Jeff Laster: I could hear everyone's reactions, people screaming. It's like being in your living room but hearing the TV in your bedroom. I could hear everything that was happening, but I couldn't move. My body was in shock. All I could do was just lie there and listen to what was happening.

Mark Warren: We were leading a song called "I Will Call Upon the Lord." Toward the end of the song, we heard popping that sounded like a loose cable in the sound system. Looking down the aisle, I saw a man reloading a gun, and I realized what was happening. I dropped to the floor and started crawling toward a door.

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Attending the event was church member Tralissa Griffin and her 14-year-old daughter Cassandra, who brought along six of her friends. Tralissa's husband David had planned to meet them at the concert.

David: Tralissa's job was to bring Cassie and all her friends home from school and feed them. And as soon as the kids were fed, they all headed off to the rally. At the time, I was working for the Federal Bureau of Prisons as a clinical social worker, and I was arriving home late. I met them as they were going down the sidewalk to get in the car. I told them I'd be there as soon as I ate and got changed. So Tralissa got the kids to the church, and Cassie and her friends went in and got great seats for the concert.

Tralissa: I was not sitting near Cassie. She was up on the second row with her friends, and I was back a few rows. I wanted to give the girls space, you know, so they could enjoy the concert.

David: Cassie had a lot of friends, and she was always inviting them to go to church with her.

Tralissa: When he came in the back door and started shooting, everybody dropped to the floor and hid between the pews. The shooting just kept going on and on. It seemed like forever. I could see one of the band members was still on stage, trying to hide behind speakers. I remember looking up over the pews to see what was going on, and all I could see was this dark figure. I couldn't make out any features, it was just darkness. I was just praying, "Lord, make this stop, Lord, make this stop." After a few minutes of praying, I heard this voice behind me, confronting him. I learned later it was Jeremiah.

Jeremiah Neitz was a 19-year-old, 6-foot-tall former Boy Scout and high school football lineman who was visiting from another church. In the face of Ashbrook's rampage, Neitz stood defiantly.

Neitz: While we're all enjoying the concert, it sounded like somebody was popping firecrackers outside. So, I walked up to the door and looked out, and just as I did, the glass blew up, like he shot through the glass at me. I started yelling, "Everybody get down!" and as soon as that happened, he came through the doors shooting. I sat down in a pew and was holding a friend of mine down. I kept telling him to stay down. The next thing I know, he starts shooting at me. Bullets are flying around me. Then he walks right up to me and puts the gun inches from my face. I could feel the heat from the barrel. He asked me, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" I said, "Yes, sir, I do. I know where I'm going when I die. Where are you going?" His face just went pale white. He sat down and blew his head off.

Tralissa: That's when the shooting stopped.

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One of the first police officers on the scene was Chip Gillette, husband of church employee Debbie Gillette. Their daughter Rebekah was attending the concert.

Debbie: When the shooting started, I tried to call my husband because he was at our house, which is directly across the street from the church, and he wasn't answering. I didn't realize it, but he was already on his way over.

Chip: I was napping on the couch when our yellow Labrador — his name was Jake — started barking wildly. I looked out the window, but there wasn't anybody out there. Then I saw a couple of guys come out, and they were just kind of looking up at the building and looking around. About that time, Paul Glenn, a member of our church, came out. I went over to him, and he said, "You need to call your SWAT buddies. There's someone shooting in the church." I immediately came back in the house, grabbed my radio and put in the call: "There's a shooting at Wedgwood Baptist Church. Send everything you got." I threw on my vest, grabbed my radio and pistol, and headed back over. At the time I was going over, the first arriving unit, Charles Gonzalez, arrived, and we went in together, not knowing what was happening inside.

Ashbrook was still shooting when Gillette and Gonzalez entered the building.

Chip: Right when we walked in, we could smell the scent of expended gunfire. Sydney Browning was lying there, drooped over the couch, dead. Shell casings were scattered all over the floor. Then we heard a couple shots go off, and we went toward them. We called it in, and they asked us to wait for SWAT. Gonzalez and I looked at each other and said, "We're not waiting for SWAT." When we entered the main room, another shot rang out, and I thought I was being shot at. I saw someone standing up, and all of a sudden, he yelled, "He shot himself," and then everybody got up and started rushing out the door. My daughter was on the front row, and she got up and ran past me, and I ran past her, and I didn't see her and she didn't see me.

Debbie: I remember she had someone else's blood all over her. When she first realized that, she said, "Man, the janitor's going to be mad about having to clean up all of this fake blood." Like a lot of people in there, she thought it was part of the show, part of a skit. The lights were low, this happened so quickly, there wasn't enough time to process what was going on. You never think something like this is going to happen. And then she realized it wasn't fake blood.

Chip: He had shot somewhere between 85 to 95 rounds using two pistols. He set off a pipe bomb near the front rows. As he was shooting, he was spewing all kinds of hateful rhetoric: "Are you ready to die for Christ?" — that sort of thing. Some of the kids, thinking it was a skit, thinking he was using a paintball gun, lept in front of him, saying, "Shoot me, shoot me." Then people realized it was real, and they ran or ducked. How Jeremiah didn't get hit or killed, I don't know. How the bullets kept missing him, I don't know. You'd have to ask the Lord about that.

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The aftermath was grim. Seven dead, just as many wounded.

Jim Douglas: We arrived to a disorienting scene. Red emergency lights flashing everywhere, reflecting off homes and trees and faces. Sirens coming and going. It seemed like every ambulance and cop in the city were there. I had my phone to one ear, with a producer urging me to get on the air with answers as quickly as possible. At the same time, teenagers and some adults began emerging from the church as I was walking toward it. They were sobbing, clinging to each other, clearly traumatized. Zombie-like in my memory.

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Her younger brother Chris survived, but Cassie Griffin was among those who perished.

Tralissa: She had just started the ninth grade at North Crowley High School. She was so excited because she was in band, and they had just started marching season. We have a couple pictures of her and her friends at football games and things like that. She loved to sing. When she was at Crowley Middle, she joined the jazz band. She played clarinet and took piano lessons. She really loved to do both — play instruments and sing and just have fun. She played a little basketball while she was in middle school 'cause she was tall and her head was right there by the basket (laughing).

David: But she really wasn't very athletic.

Tralissa: And not very competitive.

David: No, not very competitive at all (laughing). She wound up being more of their manager than a player. But really, she was just your typical 14-year-old kid who enjoyed music and hanging out with her friends. They watched movies and did lots of things around the house. She was just this normal teenage kid. She did love the Lord, though.

Tralissa: Cassie collected frogs, and there's a little story behind that. She started collecting them when she was in the fifth grade, just because they're cute, these funny little frog figurines she liked. This is when we were still living in Plainview. When we moved to Fort Worth, we went to Mardel's (a Christian book store), and there was this big poster with frogs all over it. The poster had the letters "F-R-O-G" acronym - "fully rely on God." She said, "I have to have this poster. My frogs now have meaning." Then she started sharing frogs with her friends. After the shooting, her friends started sharing frogs with us, as kind of a reminder that, as Christians, that's what we do when something happens in our lives. We fully rely on God.

For the next several days, Fort Worth was thrust into the national spotlight. Media outlets near and far poured into the city to cover the story. Then-President Bill Clinton offered condolences. Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential front-runner, canceled campaign appearances to return to the state where he grew up.

Kenneth Barr, then-mayor of Fort Worth: I vividly remember getting two phone calls. One was from the governor of Colorado, Bill Owens, who's from Fort Worth. Columbine had just happened a few months prior, and he was calling to offer condolences and tell me how Colorado had responded to the shooting. He was very helpful. The other call I got was from Gov. Bush, who was in the Midwest campaigning. He said, "I'll be there this afternoon." I told him he didn't have to come. He said, "Of course, I'm going to come. When people are shot at a church in Texas, I need to be there." He just wanted to be here to show his support.

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Over the next few days and weeks, a profile of the gunman began to emerge. He was described by neighbors as "strange" and "solitary" and had been living alone since his 85-year-old father had passed away. Discharged from the Navy in 1983 for marijuana use and convinced the government was plotting against him, he penned anti-government letters and made rambling calls to local media outlets, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Fort Worth Weekly. But his motives were never determined.

Chip Gillette: He was still living in his dad's house, and when he left the house that day, he knew he wasn't coming back. He poured concrete into all the toilets and drains. He had destroyed the interior of his house, turned the washer and dryer upside down. Why? No one knows. There was no rhyme or reason to it, other than he was just mentally ill and demon possessed.

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Those who were intimately affected by the shooting grappled with it in vastly different ways.

Jeremiah Neitz: I had PTSD for years and years. It's hard for me to be in crowded areas. If I hear any kind of loud bang, I think it's gunshots. To this day, I still haven't gone back into a church. I still have my faith, but I haven't set foot in a church, and I don't think I ever will.

Jim Douglas: I think everyone felt something beyond sadness and outrage. Some people viewed it as an attack on Christian faith itself. Churches began hiring armed guards, and congregation members started bringing guns to church. There was definitely a sense throughout the community that we all needed to support, comfort, and respect Wedgwood Baptist in every way possible. It was almost like a loss of innocence for a city that really prided itself on feeling more like a town.

Jeff Laster: I've thought about it a lot, especially that first year — the survivor guilt. Why did he come in here and kill seven people and wound seven people? How did I get shot and survive, but my best friend got shot and died?

David Griffin: We worked with youth at the church for most of our marriage, teaching Sunday school, going on mission trips. After the shooting, we took several years off and didn't do anything except just kind of exist and heal. We grieved in very different ways and allowed each other that space to grieve. Tralissa saw this as a spiritual attack, and so she dove into her faith. Me, I became angry. After dedicating so many years of our lives to serving God and working in the church and working with the youth, I felt angry and bitter. I didn't share a lot of what I was feeling with Tralissa, and she didn't share a lot of what she was feeling with me. We just wanted to give each other space.

Tralissa: We had to help Chris, too, you know, our son, because he was only 10 years old. That was really hard, to help this young child understand what's going on.

David: And then her friends too, her best friend in the world is sitting next to her when she's killed. We had to put on a strong face for them. They would come over to the house and just sit in her room for hours.

Laster: I lost my best friend. That's not the same as losing your daughter. David and Tralissa have gone to weddings of their daughter's friends. Their daughter would have been grown, married, and had kids of her own. Those are things you think about and look back on. I got shot. I lost some of my dear friends. But I cannot imagine losing a child.

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Rays of light came from this place of darkness, many who were affected say.

Kenneth Barr: After Wedgwood, we decided we needed to more efficiently address mental health as a community. In a short amount of time, we established the Mental Health Connection, an organization made up of mental health providers who meet to collaborate on how the community can meet the needs of the mental health community. Twenty-five years later, the organization is still active and still working to meet those needs.

Jeff Laster: Other churches came to us and said, "What do you need? We'll come take care of babies, clean toilets, whatever you need." Seeing the body of Christ bring all these churches and people together, that was inspiring and healing.

Jim Douglas: One thing I miss about reporting is the frequent opportunity to meet strangers who make you a better person by simply sharing their own strength and grace in the midst of despair. I was drawn to Debbie Gillette and her family. Years after the massacre, her daughter Rebekah married Justin Laird, who was paralyzed that night with a bullet in his spine. I followed their struggles to conceive a child, which they eventually did with the help of science. To me, it was important to show the renewal of life, like spring following the darkest of winters. The church itself did not close in around itself, as might have been expected, but instead opened itself, reaching out to the world. I remember that the church made a point of holding services the following Sunday, even though the sanctuary was still scarred from bullets and pipe bomb shrapnel. Wedgwood's resilience lit a path for the rest of us.

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Killed in the attack were Kristi Beckel, 14; Shawn Brown, 23; Sydney Browning, 36; Joey Ennis, 14; Cassandra Griffin, 14; Susan Kimberly Jones, 23; and Justin Michael Stegner Ray, 17.

Injured in the attack were Robert DeBord, 17; Justin Laird, 16; Kevin Galey, 38; Nicholas Skinner, 14; Jeff Laster, 34; Jaynanne Brown, 41; and Mary Beth Talley, 17 (ages reflect the time of the shooting).