A woman carrying a baby and a gun burst into an Easter service Sunday at a school in San Diego, reportedly threatening to blow up the church. She was tackled by congregants almost immediately.
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“We were just about to finish up our service and a lady came in with a gun and started talking delusional stuff,” Ronald Farmer, one of the church-goers, told reporters. She uttered words like “the rapture,” “martyrs,” according to Fox 5 San Diego.
Congregation tackles woman who burst into church with baby, gun on Easter Sunday https://t.co/QFE9t0yhGJ
— WGN TV News (@WGNNews) April 22, 2019
While she issued a string of threats that many witnesses said amounted to “random words,” pointing the gun at anyone who approached her, a number of congregants were able to exit the building.
U.S. Army member David Michael Miller explained how she was eventually taken down, saying, “I was slowly approaching watching them talk her down. She was being very apprehensive pointing the gun at them pointing the gun at her baby saying don’t come any closer.”
Miller was among the congregants who tackled the woman, taking the gun and the child from her and holding her until police arrived.
The woman was identified as Anna Conkey, a 31-year-old mother of two and a Navy veteran who had worked as a freelance digital producer for NBC San Diego. She reportedly sent an email to NBC San Diego just before she entered the church, claiming that she had a “news tip,” allegedly failing to disclose that she was the suspect:
There’s a woman claiming to be the Messiah, saying she was sent to blow up the foundation of the Church—she’s got a gun and a child is involved. The address is 4350 Mount Everest Blvd San Diego, CA 92117. There are about 70 people in the auditorium of the school where the church service is held.
Church members claimed that they recognized Conkey as someone who had attended the church in the past and may have had some issues.
“We knew who she was,” Brother Ben Wisan told NBC News. “She had been coming on and off for a little bit of time. And we had been praying for her because we wanted to see her set free.” (RELATED: One Word Noticeably Absent As Trump, Obama, Hillary And 2020 Democrats Respond To Sri Lanka Attacks)
Conkey’s 10-month-old son and five-year-old daughter, who was located at a nearby daycare, were both taken into the custody of Child Protective Services and Conkey was charged with making criminal threats and displaying a handgun.
Bomb-sniffing dogs were brought to the scene, but reportedly found nothing, while the handgun Conkey used was determined not to be loaded.