Conspiracy theorists who say Texas church shooting was a hoax arrested after harassing pastor
Police in Sutherland Springs, Texas, arrested two conspiracy theorists on Monday outside of the Baptist church where 26 people were killed last year, after they allegedly harassed the pastor and told him his daughter, who died in the mass shooting, "never even existed."
Robert Mikell Ussery, 54, and Jodie Marie Mann, 56, remain inside the Wilson County Jail. Ussery runs a website, Side Thorn, that calls the Sutherland Springs, Parkland, and Las Vegas Strip massacres "drills using crisis actors that were sold to the public as real," The Dallas Morning News reports. First Baptist Church Pastor Frank Pomeroy told the San Antonio Express-News that Ussery approached him in his car and started yelling, saying: "Your daughter never even existed. Show me her birth certificate. Show me anything to say she was here." Annabelle Pomeroy, 14, was one of 26 people killed in the Nov. 5 massacre, and Frank Pomeroy said Ussery and Mann, who goes by the name "Conspiracy Granny" online, were trying to bait him and another church member into a fight.
On a Sutherland Springs community Facebook page, residents have complained for months about Ussery and Mann, and Pomeroy said he was glad they didn't leave the scene before police could arrest them on Monday. "If it takes something happening before you get rid of these guys, then I'm just glad that this 'something happened' happened and nobody got hurt," he said.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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