Police investigating a shooting at an Alabama church that initially killed two people and wounded another said on Friday afternoon that the third victim has died.
The Vestavia Hills police department identified the victim in a post on Facebook as an 84-year-old white female who died at a hospital. They did not release her identity.
They announced earlier in the day that the shooter was a 71-year-old man who occasionally attended services.
Police captain Shane Ware did not identify the suspect, who was taken into custody after the shooting on Thursday night at St Stephen’s episcopal church in the Birmingham suburb of Vestavia Hills. Ware said prosecutors were preparing warrants to charge him with capital murder.
Ware said the man pulled a gun and opened fire during a potluck dinner attended by other church members. He killed an 84-year-old man and a 75-year-old woman, and left another woman wounded, before a person in the room restrained the gunman and held him until police arrived.
The Rev Rebecca Bridges, the church’s associate rector, led an online prayer service on the church’s Facebook page on Friday morning. She prayed not only for the victims and church members who witnessed the shooting, but also “for the person who perpetrated the shooting”.
“We pray that you will work in that person’s heart,” Bridges said. “And we pray that you will help us to forgive.”
Bridges, who is currently in London, alluded to other recent mass shootings as she prayed that elected officials in Washington and Alabama “will see what has happened at St Stephens and Uvalde and Buffalo and in so many other places and their hearts will be changed, minds will be opened.”
“And that our culture will change and that our laws will change in ways that will protect all of us,” she added.
There have been several high-profile shootings in May and June, starting with a racist attack on May 14 that killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
The following week, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Thursday’s shooting happened just over a month after one person was killed and five injured when a man opened fire on Taiwanese parishioners at a church in southern California.
It comes nearly seven years to the day after an avowed white supremacist killed nine people during Bible study at Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Agents with the FBI, US Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives joined investigators at the scene, which remained cordoned off Friday with yellow police tape and police vehicles with flashing lights blocking the route to the church.
People huddled and prayed nearby in the hours after the shooting.
“It is shocking. Saint Stephen’s is a community built on love and prayers and grace and they are going to come together,” the Rev Kelley Hudlow, an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Alabama, told broadcast outlet WBRC. “People of all faiths are coming together to pray to hope for healing.”
She said supportive messages were coming in from all over the US and the world. “We need everybody out there. Pray, think, meditate and send love to this community because we are going to need all of it,” she said.
Ware said on Thursday night: “From what we’ve gathered from the circumstances of this evening, a lone suspect entered a small church group meeting and began shooting.”
The church’s website listed a “Boomers Potluck” for Thursday night. “There will be no program, simply eat and have time for fellowship,” the flyer read.