The US Department of Justice has announced that it has reached a preliminary agreement to compensate the survivors and relatives of those who died in the November 2017 shooting at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The compensation was set at 144.5 million dollars (about 132 million euros).
The shooting occurred on Sunday morning during a religious service: 26 people were killed and another 22 were injured. The assailant, 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley, had died shortly after the attack. Kelley was in the Air Force and in 2012 was convicted by a military court of domestic violence and assaulting his son. He had been discharged for misconduct, sentenced to twelve months in prison and finally demoted. However, the sentence was not included in the federal database that is used to check who wants to buy a gun: since his discharge, Kelley had therefore managed to legally buy the semi-automatic rifle used in the massacre. In 2021, a federal court ruled that the US government was responsible for what happened.