The crazed gunman who opened fire on worshippers at a Mormon church in Michigan before torching the building is being pegged as a fervent MAGA devotee who believed the Mormon church was the “antichrist.”

Thomas Jacob Sanford, 40, plowed his American flag-adorned pickup truck into a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at Grand Blanc during Sunday services before opening fire on hundreds of worshippers, leaving four dead and eight injured.

Police have not ascribed a motive for the attack, but a local politician sees clues in a conversation he had with Sanford days earlier while canvassing in nearby Burton.

“There’s certain things you don’t forget,” Kris Johns, a candidate for the upcoming Burton city council elections, said to the Detroit Free Press. “This is not a forgettable guy.”

He recalls that Sanford — who was killed in a shootout with officers at the scene — was outgoing, polite, and “extremely friendly,” even as he displayed animosity toward the Mormon church.

“It was very much standard anti-LDS talking points that you would find on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook,” he told the Free Press.

During his 20-minute conversation, Mr. Johns says, Sanford described how he served in the military during the Iraq war and struggled with drugs after returning home. He also told the candidate that he had moved to Utah at one point for work and began a relationship with a woman whose family was Mormon.

The family “wanted me to get rid of my tattoos. They wanted me to do all this stuff, and I wouldn’t do it,” Mr. Johns recalls Sanford telling him.

Mr. Johns says the conversation took a “very sharp turn” after Sanford told him he was a Christian. He began asking Mr. Johns pointed questions about the Mormon faith, asking about Jesus’s role in the faith and the history of the LDS church.
“I just didn’t know what the next question was going to be,” Mr. Johns recalls, adding that his responses led Sanford to describe Mormonism as “the antichrist” and to say the church’s followers “believe they are above Jesus.”

The White House spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said Monday on Fox News that the FBI director, Kash Patel, has received similar information.

“From what I understand based on my conversations with the FBI director, all they know right now is this was an individual who hated people of the Mormon faith, and they are trying to understand more about this, how premeditated it was, how much planning went into it, whether he left a note,” she said.

Sanford also appeared to be a fervent supporter of President Trump, based on social media posts.

In one social media post dated September 2019, he is seen wearing a Trump 2020 T-shirt that had the phrase “Make Liberals Cry Again” printed across the bottom.

Mr. Johns told the Detroit Free Press that Sanford had a Trump sign on his lawn but that the two did not discuss politics. “There was no mention of anything right or left, blue or red,” he recalls.

Sanford was one of two veterans who unleashed fatal violence on the public this past weekend.

Nigel Edge, a Marine who was wounded in Iraq, has been identified as the man who pulled his boat up to a crowded American Fish Company restaurant along the Cape Fear River at Southport, North Carolina, on Saturday and opened fire, killing three people and leaving another five injured before he was apprehended by local police.

Mr. Edge, who legally changed his name from Sean DeBevoise in 2023 and reportedly suffered from PTSD, has been described by local law-enforcement sources as harboring various Q-Anon conspiracy theories, according to reports. He also recently filed a lawsuit against a country music artist, Kellie Pickler, alleging that she tried to poison him with a spiked glass of Jim Beam bourbon when he escorted her at the 2012 CMT Music Awards, according to court documents obtained by TMZ.