The death toll from the shooting at a Mormon church in Michigan climbed to four victims on Sunday evening, after local police said two more bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the church after it had been set on fire.
Another eight people were injured in the attack, according to an update from law enforcement. The suspected killer, 40-year-old Thomas Jacob Sanford, was also killed after confronting officers.
Sanford, according to police, plowed his Chevy truck into the church before entering and firing; hundreds of people were in attendance for Sunday service at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan.
A fire was also set at the church, which authorities believe Sanford started, and it appeared to be set with “an accelerant of some sort,” like gasoline, according to The New York Times. Sources told the New York Post earlier on Sunday that “several improvised explosive devices” were found at the church and that a bomb squad had been brought in to investigate.
Sanford was a 40-year-old former Marine who served in the Iraq War from 2004 to 2008, according to posts from his mom’s Facebook account. He was a resident of Burton, Michigan, which is about eight miles from where the attack happened.
President Donald Trump, shortly after the shooting, said it “appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians” in the U.S.
The attack on the LDS church comes a month after the deadly shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. President Trump has said he wants his second administration to focus more on anti-Christian attacks and bias; here is what he said during a speech at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. earlier this month:
“There is a tremendous anti-Christian bias. We don’t hear about it. You hear about anti-Semitic, but you don’t hear about anti-Christian. They have a strong anti-Christian bias, but we’re ending that rapidly, I will tell you. We’re in a much different world today than we were one year ago.”
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