SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas — The man responsible for the fifth deadliest mass shooting on U.S. soil was a wannabe tough guy who worked dead-end jobs, dated underage girls — and beat his infant stepson so badly he broke the child’s skull.
Devin Patrick Kelley, who killed 26 people and injured 20 more Sunday before taking his own life, drove a red Corvette and bragged on Facebook that his custom modified assault rifle was a “bad bitch.”
But in reality, he was a lowly security guard who was back living with his parents and was kicked out of the Air Force for roughing up his first wife and cracking her little son’s skull.
“He pled to intentionally doing it,” Don Christensen, a retired colonel and chief prosecutor for the Air Force told the New York Times.
His wife divorced him and he was booted from the service for bad conduct, but Kelley showed signs he was a bad apple long before that, according to ex-girlfriends who said he stalked and harassed them.
“He was very sick in the head,” Katy Landry, a former girlfriend, told NBC. “Years after dating me he would try to bribe me to hang out with him. He ended up assaulting me.”
Another ex, Brittany Adcock, 22, said Kelley dated her for two months around 2009 — when he was 18 and she was just 13.
“At the time I didn’t think much into it being so young but now I realize that there’s something off about someone who is 18 with someone who is 13,” she said.
Kelley became so desperate after the 13-year-old dumped him that he offered her money to get back together, she said.
He even crudely suggested the girl move in with him and his wife — an offer that came with a twisted string attached.
“One time he told me I should move in with him and his wife and that he would take care of me as long as I walked around topless,” Adcock said.
Kelley graduated from New Braunfels High School in 2009, according to a now-deleted LinkedIn page where he claimed to have attended the school for six years.
He joined the Air Force shortly after graduation, but landed in hot water while serving at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in 2012, when he was charged with assaulting his spouse and her child, according to Navy officials.
He faced a court-martial at which he was convicted of assault and aggravated assault in November 2012, and then confined to military jail for 12 months. After he did the time, he was discharged for “bad conduct,” according to the Navy.
Earlier, on Aug. 1 that year, he was charged with animal cruelty for beating a puppy while he lived in a Colorado trailer park.
A witness told cops they saw Kelley pounce on the animal and then begin “beating on the dog with both fists, punching it in the head and chest,” NBC reported citing El Paso County court records.
“He could hear the suspect yelling at the dog and while he was striking it, the dog was yelping and whining,” the account continued. “The suspect then picked up the dog by the neck into the air and threw it onto the ground and then drug him away to lot 60.”
Kelley was issued a summons but not arrested. A judge gave him a deferred probationary sentence and ordered him to pay $368 in restitution. After Kelley paid the fines, his charge was dismissed in 2016.
In 2014, he began amassing a gun collection, buying one weapon each year until 2017, according to authorities, who said he bought two guns in Colorado and two in Texas.
Also in 2014, he married Danielle Shields — whose grandmother Lula White he would kill inside the First Baptist Church.
The pair lived on Kelley’s parents property in New Braunfels, records show.
He worked the graveyard security shift at Schlitterbahn water park in New Braunfels for less than six weeks before he was “terminated,” a park spokeswoman told the New York Times, adding, “He was not a good fit.”
He was most recently working as a guard at the Summit Vacation and RV Resort for the last month and a half, according to a manager there.
When he wasn’t working, Kelley was trolling Sutherland Springs residents on Facebook. He spent the months before his attack “starting drama” with strangers on the social media site — and he specifically targeted people from “within 20 minutes” of the population-400 town where he committed his heinous attack, according to resident Johnathan Castillo.
“It’s like he went looking for it, you know what I mean?” Castillo told the LA Times, referring to Kelley’s Facebook beefs.
“You can tell people who are defending their opinions versus someone who’s looking to start something.”
With Post wires