25 years later, congregants remember shooting at Fort Worth’s Wedgwood Baptist Church

Faith has kept the members of Wedgwood Baptist Church going in the 25 years since a gunman opened fire at a Wednesday night service , the former pastor and congregants said at a special service Sunday.

Sunday marked the 25th anniversary of the shooting, in which the gunman killed seven people and wounded seven others before killing himself in the church.

Chip Gillette, an off-duty police officer who ran across the street to the church to help when the shooting happened, is a member of the church who spoke Sunday. He said he became angry, while his wife became more religious. Now they’re both devoted to their faith.

Gillette looked outside his house when his dog started barking, a police spokesperson said at the time. Gillette saw teens fleeing the church and ran there, unarmed, and then rushed back to his house to get his gun and police radio when he heard the gunshots.

Former pastor Al Meredith said the church was heartbroken, but turned to God for peace.

News articles from the time said the gunman had a conversation with one 19-year-old man during the shooting, with the 19-year-old trying to talk him down and the gunman demeaning the religion before sitting in a pew and shooting himself.

Witnesses described the shooting to the Star-Telegram that night.

“We thought it was a joke,” Kristen Dickens, a 14-year-old who was sitting in the second pew of the sanctuary when the gunfire erupted, said at the time. “We were singing, and he told us to shut up. ... I thought our pastor was playing a joke on us.”

The shooting sent congregants diving for cover beneath pews as the gunman fired, stopping to reload several times.

The victims killed, which included some students from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, were Shawn Brown, 23; Susan Kimberly Jones, 23; Cassandra Griffin, 14; Joseph Ennis, 14; Justin Ray, 17; Sydney Browning, 36; and Kristi Beckel, 14.

The Wednesday night church service and “See You at the Pole” prayer event featured Christian rock group Forty Days, drawing — as it was intended to — many young people among the more than 200 worshipers.

The gunman, a 47-year-old man who neighbors described as a recluse who often carried a gym bag, also critically wounded seven others.

At the anniversary service Sunday, current pastor Dale Braswell told the stories of Israelites in exile and the destruction of the temple, relating it to the shooting, and the Israelites’ return to Jerusalem and rebuilding the temple, saying the younger generation had only heard stories of the temple’s destruction and didn’t understand the pain of seeing it firsthand.

He said that for both the older generations and those younger, they were able to heal with time and faith.

This story contains information from the Star-Telegram’s archives.