COLORADO SPRINGS — One year after a gunman killed two sisters in the parking lot of New Life Church, the congregation is stronger than ever, pastor Brady Boyd said Sunday.
“The church is doing great — we have grown,” Boyd told media.
But when Matthew Murray gunned down Rachel Works, 18, and Stephanie Works, 16, as they prepared to leave the church, he brought darkness into the lives of some congregants that has yet to lift, Boyd said.
His sermon Sunday held a message for those who haven’t begun to heal: It’s OK to mourn.
“I know you’re not doing OK,” he said.
The Workses were among four people whom Murray, 24, killed before he killed himself after a church security guard, Jeanne Assam, 43, wounded him.
Murray had first struck at Youth With a Mission, a school and missionary organization in Arvada. There he killed Tiffany Johnson, 26, and Philip Crouse, 24.
New Life has as many as 50 volunteer security guards at services, and last Dec. 9, Assam was among them.
Assam, who appeared Sunday with Boyd, said she harbors no animosity toward Murray. “He didn’t start off to be mixed up and confused,” she said. “He started off to be a good person, but he went down a wrong path.”
“I did what I had to do,” Assam said of shooting Murray in a hallway close to a children’s chapel at the megachurch.
She shot Murray three times — twice in the thigh and once in the wrist — before he turned a gun on himself.
“I don’t feel bad about what I had to do,” Assam said. “I just feel bad that people had to die.”
Assam, a former law officer in Minneapolis, said she has applied for a position on the Colorado Springs police force.
Security worked “flawlessly” on the day Murray went on a rampage that wounded three others, including David Works, the father of Rachel and Stephanie, Boyd said.
But since the shootings, Boyd has added a full-time security director and one full-time guard to the formerly all-volunteer security detail.
Security guards are now more readily identifiable than they were, he said. Some of those who attend the church say that increased visibility has contributed to their peace of mind.
“It is very comforting for me to see the increase in security,” said June Gordon, 51, who last year was with her sons Christopher, who was 17, and Matthew, then 12, in the church lobby when she heard Murray’s gunshots.
She choked back tears Sunday as she told of her decision to help her younger boy, who has Down syndrome, escape.
“I just lost sight of our 17-year-old. I didn’t know where he was. … It was just get out and hope that Christopher finds me,” she said.
Gordon and her husband, Russ, 48, said that for all the pain of that day, many things went right; more could have been killed.
“Too many things went right for that to be a coincidence, an accident,” said Russ Gordon. “It was providence.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
