Safety in the Sanctuary: Is Your Church Prepared?

“His grateful mother later told me that her son had never heard such authority come out of someone’s mouth as he then heard from those men!” Carl Chinn recalls. “Clearly, he finally understood it was time to get out of that hallway!” It was a good thing; the shooter had blown out the glass doors and bullets were now ricocheting off interior walls.

Chinn was standing guard just outside of New Life Pastor Brady Boyd’s office, while the pastor and Hayford were meeting at the time the shooting started. The first shots he heard were the ones coming into the building as the shooter stood outside the doors, shooting in, and his fellow security team members were clearing the children’s hallway.

As Chinn ran toward the sound of gunfire and the hallway came into view, the shots were so loud it was hard to place where they were coming from. With his weapon drawn, he entered the now-empty hallway and saw Buck Snodgrass.

Snodgrass, a Vietnam vet, was positioned in the middle of the hallway, making himself a target as he’d yelled at people to get back and to go the other way. “Your shooter is coming through the doors to your left,” he told Chinn.

As Snodgrass made his way down the hallway to go retrieve his own weapon from his car, Chinn quickly moved up the hall toward the gunman who was coming through the east doors into the hallway.

 “The first thing the gunman saw was me in the hallway with my weapon drawn,” Chinn said. “I’m sure he wasn’t expecting that.”

Murray was dressed in all black; and Chinn could tell he was wearing some type of ballistic or tactical vest, though it was hard to tell which from the 100 yards or so that separated the two men.

Having been around guns his entire life, Chinn knew the range capabilities of the assault rifle the shooter was holding as well as the small pistol he was himself carrying. He selected a particular column as the point where the shooter would be 10 yards away and got ready.

At that point, Chinn believed he was the only armed defender left in the building. He thought Jeanne Assam had gone home. “Jeanne had been on our team about a month, not with us very long at all. I thought there were only three of us there, and it turned out there were five of us. There was another guy in a different building; and when he heard the announcements on the radio, he came running. But it was over by the time he got there.”

But for now, Chinn was alone. He says he felt like electricity gripped his chest. It was the same sensation he had experienced when he’d faced that gun in the lobby of Focus on the Family. “The first thing that had hit me that day at Focus was an overwhelming feeling of stupidity because I had not thought about seeing a gun,” says Chinn. “I just hadn’t considered that. I had considered lots of situations, and we had done the planning; but somehow in my mind, I’d never accepted the fact I was going to be faced with a gun in that lobby. That day, I had made up my mind I would never let myself or others feel that way again.”