DENVER — Between his two deadly shooting rampages, church gunman Matthew Murray apparently posted a furious threat on the Internet to kill Christians, it was revealed Tuesday.
The warning — and other anguished, despair-filled messages over the past few months — were posted by someone using the screen name “nghtmrchld26.” The postings paint a picture of a Colorado youth once affiliated with Youth With a Mission, as 24-year-old Murray had been.
Murray killed two people at Youth With a Mission, a training center for missionaries in the Denver suburb of Arvada, early Sunday and later killed two teenage sisters at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. An autopsy determined that Murray killed himself with a bullet to the head after he was brought down by gunfire from a volunteer security guard at the church, authorities said.
“I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the (expletive) teeth and I WILL shoot to kill,” said Sunday’s posting by nghtmrchld26 on a site for former Pentecostals.
“God, I can’t wait till I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you … as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.”
At least one visitor to the site was alarmed and contacted the FBI promptly, before the second attack, the site’s administrator said.
Denver FBI said the information was passed on to police in Arvada and Colorado Springs. However, Colorado Springs police Sgt. Scott Schwall said police did not learn the Murray family home’s address in Englewood until after the church shootings.
The online threats appear to include whole passages lifted from a manifesto written by Eric Harris, one of the teens who carried out the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton.
Murray was dismissed from Youth With a Mission in 2002 for what the training center has described only as health reasons. One post weeks ago by nghtmrchld26 was called “My YWAM Horror Story.”
“Why was I told that I couldn’t be a missionary because I wasn’t ‘social enough’? I was told that I was ‘an introvert,’” nghtmrchld26 wrote. “Everyone else got to go on their outreaches except for a few who lied about smoking (cigarettes). The authoritarianism and hypocrisy is outrageous.”
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