the community. and this is where everybody comes to worship. this is if you re a baptist, this is where you come. and surrounding towns, you know, they all come to this church. it s a like i say, they re so united. there s so much love for one another. there s no room for hate. there shouldn t be room for hate. reporter: thank you very much. well, we feel the pain of the community. we felt it in the places we visited. we felt it in the people who participated in this candlelight individu vigil. many of them are not from this particular area. they ve come from many miles to participate. even though it looks like a small gathering, we must remember, this was a small community. this is a very rural area. getting from one town to another is not that easy. they have to drive many miles to get here. well, we re surrounding there s stockdale, there s floresville. everybody knows everybody.
suffered such a tragedy today. 26 people who were killed in a mass shooting inside a small texas church. people here are gathered to support each other. many of these people coming from surrounding communities as well. we just heard from some people who knew one of the victims. the 14-year-old daughter of the pastor of the church where this all took place. and these people, she said, are here to lift up each other, to remember the victims of this horrible tragedy and to show that they are there to bring love, not hate. meantime, president trump is also monitoring the investigation. he, too, extending best wishes. his prayers from afar. he says this mass shooting in texas is, an act of evil. the president speaking out publicly for the first time since the gunman dressed in all black opened fire at today s small town baptist church service in texas. 26 people, again, are dead. the youngest victim just 5 years old. right now the president is in
kelley. officials say the gunman dressed all in black was wearing a ballistic vest. was armed with an assault-type rifle when he opened fire on the first church of first baptist church. victims range in age from 5 to 72 years old. texas governor greg abbott became emotional as he described the magnitude of this tragedy. as a state, we re dealing with the largest mass shooting in our state s history. there are so many families who ve lost family members. fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. the tragedy, of course, is worsened by the fact it occurred in a church, a place of worship, where these people were innocently gunned down. we re told the shooter died after a brief chase into a neighboring county. there s zstill no word on a
number of law enforcement officials there on the scene. fbi, atf agents. juli juliette, when a tragic mass shooting like this, they are coming upon the scene, i imagine responsibilities are sort of divvied out, so to speak. what would the federal investigators be taking on in this investigation? specifically? well, familiar having all these different entities come up so an incident command is formed. the lead is going to be local police department. the fbi is providing support. such a small town, in terms of forensics, in terms of honorable body you know, the sort of corpses, you know, you need to do this in a way that s respectful of what happened. the fbi has resources for that. of course, it took place in a church. it s going to be a question whether this satisfies requirements of hate crime, federal law, does not appear to be terrorism in the legal sense of the term. in terms of was there an
i think this has been something that he s been looking at doing for a while. and that he went ahead and possibly, very possibly staked this church out earlier and made the determination this would be the best soft target he could pick out. fortunately, the neighbor was armed and actually very possibly could have stopped him from continuing to fire into the church, although apparently from the sheriff s discussion, it looks like he might have been leaving the interior of the church at that point in time, but either way, it sounds like he stopped him from what he was doing. he dropped his weapon, got in the car and then that short chase ensued. and we have learned that there were additional firearms inside that vehicle. everyone, thank you. stand by. i want to bring in cnn s gustalvo valdez live in sutherland springs, texas, where a vigil is under way. we know the governor is there also. tell me what you re seeing. reporter: ana, good evening. as you can see, a small but growing numb