US:The gunshots were so loud that Jeanne Assam thought the shooter already was in the building.
A former police officer, Assam (42), was on security duty on Sunday morning at New Life Church here. Hours earlier, a 24-year-old who had been rejected from a missionary school in a Denver suburb had shot and killed two staffers there. Now he was spraying New Life's parking lot with gunfire and pushing through the doors to the sanctuary.
Assam hid and inched toward the gunman, Matthew Murray, as dozens of terrified worshippers fled. "I came out of cover, identified myself and took him down," she said. "I just knew I was not going to wait for him to do any more damage." She said she prayed before opening fire.
Murray dropped to the ground. He was carrying an assault rifle, two pistols and a backpack holding more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.
"I give the credit to God. This has got to be God, because of the firepower he had versus what I have," Assam said at a packed news conference on Monday.
Police say Assam saved untold lives as they described how Murray, the home-schooled son of prominent neurologist Ronald Murray, terrorised two religious institutions during a harrowing 12-hour spree.
Police said it was unclear whether Assam's shots killed Murray or whether the gunman, after being wounded, took his own life. He killed two teenage sisters at New Life Church on Sunday afternoon and wounded their father and two other worshippers. The gunman had been at large since 12:30am, when he attacked the Youth With a Mission academy in Arvada.
Peter Warren, the school's director, said that when Murray came to the school early on Sunday asking to stay the night, staff did not recognise him.
Later the school realised he had attended its training programme in 2002. The Arvada school is a branch of an international missionary programme that trains thousands annually.
Warren said school officials refused to assign Murray to a mission because of an unspecified health problem that could make such work "unsafe".
In court papers, police said Murray had written threatening letters to the school and spent many hours a day as a computer student, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported. He lived with his brother and his parents in an affluent neighbourhood in Englewood, a suburb at the southern end of Denver's sprawl.
Sgt Jeff Jensen said it was too early to know what motivated him. It was also unclear why Murray travelled the roughly 75 miles from the missionary school in Arvada to New Life Church.
New Life has a branch office of Youth With a Mission and also achieved notoriety last year when its founder, Ted Haggard, was accused by a former gay prostitute of trading drugs and sex.
Early on Sunday morning, New Life's security director had warned senior pastor Brady Boyd about the missionary school attacks. At her home, Assam read about the shooting online and felt a chill.
She was working her regular shift on Sunday. There were about 7,000 people on campus as the midday service wound to a close and Murray opened fire.