As if the Sutherland Springs shooting, in which 26 people were killed when Devin Kelley opened fire in a church with a semi-automatic rifle, wasn’t traumatic enough for the survivors and families of the victims, two conspiracy theorists have finally been arrested after harassing survivors for months following the shooting.
As BuzzFeed News reports, Robert Ussery, 54, and his partner Jodi Mann, 56, were arrested on Monday at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, the site of the shooting. Ussery and Mannn run a website called “Side Thorn,” which perpetuates theories that mass shootings in the United States are actually just “drills” and hoaxes created by the U.S. government, and that all survivors are actually crisis actors used by the government to convince the public that the events that took place were real. As BuzzFeed notes, their homepage offers a $100,000 reward to anyone who can prove the deaths of any of the individuals killed in tragedies like the recent shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School or the Las Vegas concert shooting.
According to multiple survivors and families of the Sutherland Springs shooting victims, Ussery and Mann have been harassing them endlessly since the shooting last November. Pastor Frank Pomeroy, whose 14-year-old daughter was killed in the massacre, says Ussery repeatedly told him his daughter never existed, demanded to see her birth and death certificates and even directed death threats at him.
“[Ussery] continually yelled and screamed and hollered and told me he was gonna hang me from a tree, and pee on me while I’m hanging,” Pomeroy told the San Antonio Express News.
Multiple videos on the couple’s website show them engaging in other horrific activities, ranging from confronting one witness in her car and demanding that she, “tell the truth about the drill,” to harrassing a relative of multiple victims over the phone.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time conspiracy theorists have tried to use others’ tragedies to promote absurd ideas and, often, their anti-gun control beliefs. As recently as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, multiple conspiracy theories speculating that shooting survivors were being used to promote a liberal agenda were being spread throughout Twitter — even by Donald Trump Jr.
As of Tuesday evening Mann and Ussery were still in police custody. “We’re going to pray that he stays away [after he’s released],” Pomeroy told local radio station KTSA on Tuesday.