QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I REALLY WARNED YALL I SWEAR, I was so close man.”
—Jalisa Washington on Twitter. Washington apparently tried to caution her fellow University of North Texas students that something was amiss at a homecoming party Sunday night. The floor of the third-floor apartment collapsed under the weight of the dancing, jumping homecoming revelers. Six people sustained minor injuries, and fifty people have been displaced from the student apartments.
BIG NEWS
One Week Later
On November 5, service at the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church were interrupted by a gunman, who shot and killed 26 people execution-style before fleeing and taking his own life. At Sunday’s service, one week after the congregation was rocked by tragedy, a record crowd was in attendance. Pastor Frank Pomeroy—who lost his fourteen-year-old daughter, Annabelle Pomeroy, in the attack—announced last week that he would no longer be using the church building for worship services. Instead, Pomeroy led services at a baseball field, delivering what the New York Times describes as a sermon that “emphasized the power of light to triumph over darkness.” Later Sunday, the church building opened up as a memorial to the victims. The walls and floor of the sanctuary had been painted white, and pews were removed, replaced by white folding chairs with a different victim’s name painted in gold on each of them. A red rose—and a pink one for the unborn child who was killed—sat on the chairs. A line of community members and people from surrounding areas formed outside of the church, which was open to the public. “I want the world to know that that building will be open so that everybody who walks in there will know that the people who died there lived for the Lord and Savior and would want them to live for the same as well,” Pomeroy says.
MEANWHILE, IN TEXAS…
A History of Abuse
The first ex-wife of the Sutherland Springs shooter spoke out for the first time on Friday, detailing a history of abuse. Tessa Brennaman, who divorced Devin Kelley in 2012, opened up to CBS News about her violent marriage to Kelley, including the incidents that led him to be court-martialed from the Air Force.
Re-election Bid
Governor Greg Abbott officially filed his candidacy for his second term of office on Veterans Day, the first day of the filing period. Speaking to a crowd of veterans at the American Legion-Charles Johnson House in Austin, he laid out a new set of policies supporting veterans, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Cold Case
A seventy-year-old man was arrested last week for the 1974 death of an Alice police officer, the Houston Chronicle reports. The suspect, who was identified Sunday as Roberto Lopez, has been a person of interest in the case since the beginning. He was arrested in Alabama and charged with capital murder for the December 1, 1974 shooting of Matthew Murphy.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Some links are paywalled or subscription-only.
Self-driving trucks have been driving refrigerators from El Paso to Southern California since early October Wired
The Texas man who shared a viral photo of a Muslim woman ignoring the victims of a London terror attack was actually a Russian bot Newsweek
A San Antonio-based photojournalist will go on trial this week in a Trump inauguration riot case Austin American-Statesman
This is the closest we’ll probably get to Pop 4 Prez Texas Monthly
Here’s what chimps and other zoo animals in Dallas do for birth control Dallas Morning News
