Jerry Gumm, the 81-year-old pastor of Richmond Road Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, who was critically injured and lost his wife and a daughter during a mass shooting at the church last month, says he won’t let the devil stop his praise. He urged his congregants to do the same.
In a defiant return Sunday to the church where his wife, Beverly Gumm, 72, and one of their daughters, Christina Combs, 32, were fatally shot on July 13, the recovering pastor offered his congregants comfort and inspiration.
“I’m going to say it like Mark Twain said, ‘The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.’ I was supposed to be dead. He got two of us but didn’t kill all of us. And I’m thankful he didn’t get none of the rest of you,” Pastor Gumm told his flock barely two days after he was released from a local hospital, where he spent about a month recovering from injuries.
“I know that you all have been terrorized and traumatized, probably even more than me. I came into it [the shooting] and almost immediately I was out of it. I had no idea what was going on, what you all had to see. And I’m very sorry of that,” he added. “I know it’s going [to] take a while for us to just adjust back, but I want to encourage you, we’ve got to do it. We can’t let the devil stop us from serving the Lord.”
He then read Matthew 23 and explained that he is still working to regain his strength. Doctors say his recovery will take about six to eight months, he said.
Pastor Gumm’s wife and daughter were both fatally shot by 47-year-old Guy House, who also took his own life. House went on a shooting rampage at the church after he shot and injured a Kentucky State Police trooper Jude Remilien at the Blue Grass Airport.
House reportedly went to the church looking for one of Combs’ sisters, who was an ex-girlfriend.
“’I just want to speak to Angel,’ that’s our sister. My mother said Angel is not here. He said, ‘well I guess someone is gonna have to die then.’ And shot twice at her. The first time, she ducked and [he] missed. Second time [his bullet] hit her in the chest,” Star Jones, another of Combs’ sisters, told WKYT.
In addition to killing Combs, her mother and injuring her father, House also injured her husband, Randy Combs, who is also recovering from his wounds.
In an interview with WKYT as he was being released from the hospital last Friday, Pastor Gumms described House as “evil.”
“I ran into evil itself. This man had already done his evil, back behind me and terrorized my church,” Gumm recalled. “Murdered my wife and my daughter, and then he badly injures my son-in-law, and I’m on my power chair. He ambushed me, 81-year-old man, unarmed crippled on a power chair and he began shooting. He began taunting me, cursing me, laughing at me. He shot me off of my power chair. It was either on my head or up on my head, and tried to kill me, but he didn’t manage it. He wasn’t as bad as he thought he was.”
Pastor Gumm said doctors told him if his tongue hadn’t stopped House’s bullet, he probably would not have survived the attack.
“The doctor said if that tongue hadn’t caught that bullet, it would have gone in my head and it would have killed me,” he told WKYT. “God and those miracle workers gave me my tongue back.”
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