Wedgwood Baptist Church shooting

On September 15, 1999, a mass shooting occurred at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, during a "See You at the Pole" rally featuring a concert by the Christian rock group Forty Days. 47-year-old Larry Gene Ashbrook entered the church, disparaged Christianity and the beliefs of those present, and opened fire with a Ruger 9mm semi-automatic handgun and a .380-caliber handgun, reloading several times. He also threw a pipe bomb into the church, which exploded but caused no additional deaths. Seven people were killed — four of them teenagers, including a 14-year-old boy, two 14-year-old girls, and a 17-year-old boy — and seven others were wounded, including one victim left paralyzed from the chest down. The shooting lasted less than 10 minutes and ended when Ashbrook sat down in a pew and shot himself.

Witnesses said Ashbrook initially asked a victim if this was "where that damn religious meeting is being held" before shooting him. When some in the church mistook the attack for a staged skit, two people attempted to film him with cameras; Ashbrook shot both, killing one, and disabled the cameras. A 19-year-old named Jeremiah "Jeremy" Neitz reportedly confronted Ashbrook verbally during the attack, an account later described by Time magazine as "unconfirmed" and possibly "pious invention," though the Houston Press reported that a Fort Worth police detective who interviewed Neitz corroborated the substance of the exchange.

Ashbrook had shown erratic and frightening behavior in the years preceding the attack, particularly after his mother's death nine years earlier. His father died about two months before the shooting. Neighbors described witnessing him behave violently toward his father but said they were afraid to report it. In the months before the attack, Ashbrook sent rambling letters to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram claiming he was being framed for crimes he did not commit and was being targeted by the CIA. Police found materials for making pipe bombs in his home, along with evidence that he had extensively damaged the interior of his house. His brother described him as a paranoid schizophrenic. Investigators were unable to determine a definitive motive. A Houston-area writer claimed Ashbrook had ties to an anti-Semitic hate group and said he had interviewed him in 1997, but representatives of groups that monitor hate organizations said Ashbrook did not appear in their databases.

In the aftermath, President Bill Clinton and then-Texas governor George W. Bush both publicly responded to the shooting. The church held a Sunday service four days later, with lead pastor Al Meredith preaching forgiveness for Ashbrook. Meredith continued to comment publicly on the shooting in later years, including at its 20th anniversary in 2019, drawing comparisons to other mass shootings in the intervening years. The seven victims were memorialized outside the church.