Following his decorated service in the Marine Corps, which included a nearly seven-month deployment as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Thomas Jacob Sanford found a fresh start in Utah after 2008.
There, according to a longtime friend, he met a girlfriend who introduced him to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also began abusing crystal meth, the friend said.
The relationship with the girlfriend dissolved, but, the friend insisted, that wasn’t what set Sanford on a violent path that police say culminated in a fatal shooting and fire Sunday at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Michigan.
As investigators search for a motive for what they describe as a “targeted” attack and officials ask for calm amid a recent spate of deadly gun violence across the country, those who knew Sanford, 40, say they are coming to terms with the man they knew and the one who carried out the attack against the church.
“It needs to be made clear this wasn’t a simple act of him having his heart broken by a girl who was Mormon,” said the friend, who asked not to be named for safety concerns. “That was his introduction into Mormonism and what it was all about. It was never about ‘that girl broke my heart.’”
It was far more complicated, according to those who knew him over the years.
“Once he got back from Utah, he cleaned himself out,” the friend said, “and from that point on lived a somewhat normal life.”
But there were difficulties in Michigan that tested him, too.
Records show he was arrested and accused of felony burglary in October 2011, although details about the case or its resolution weren’t immediately available.
In September 2015, his son was born six weeks premature, according to local news reports at the time. The boy was diagnosed with congenital hyperinsulinism, a rare condition in which too much insulin is produced in the pancreas, and he had to be treated over multiple months at a Fort Worth, Texas, hospital.
The experience was overwhelming for Sanford and the child’s mother. The couple married in 2016 in Atlas Township, where he grew up outside Flint.
“Don’t ever take having healthy kids for granted,” Sanford told the Oxford Leader newspaper. “It’s been a roller coaster, but the support is amazing. We are so grateful for the community.”
At the time, Sanford was employed at a Coca-Cola distribution center in Flint.
Garry Reynolds Jr., a former colleague, said his co-workers rallied around the family as Brantlee was going through operations and the Sanfords needed financial help with the costs.
“He loved his son,” Reynolds said of Sanford. “He loved that boy.”
Reynolds couldn’t recall any red flags at work involving Sanford, complaints about his behavior or negative comments about the Latter-day Saints church.
“This was a guy that planted sunflowers,” Reynolds recalled. “He had a large field of sunflowers. They’d all come up at once, and he would let people come and take pictures in his field, just because it made people happy.”
Reynolds said that he wasn’t sure what Sanford was doing for work in more recent years and that he mostly stayed in touch with Sanford’s wife on social media.
Former colleagues, he said, were “flabbergasted” to learn Sanford was named as the shooting and arson suspect at the Latter-day Saints church in Grand Blanc.
“Everyone’s just going, ‘What happened?’” Reynolds said. “Where in his life did it crack?”
Four people were killed and several others were wounded in the onslaught Sunday morning during a worship service. At least two of the four victims were fatally shot, police said, and the bodies of two others were found in the debris of the fire.
Authorities haven’t released the victims’ names. They said those injured are ages 6 to 78.
Sanford had smashed his pickup truck into the church’s brick wall before the shooting began, and he was killed in an exchange of gunfire with responding officers.
He had grown up just several miles away from the church.
A woman who said she got to know the Sanfords because their sons attend the same school said the shooting came as a shock.
“We never could have predicted this. I can only tell you they are amazing parents who were heavily involved in his life,” the woman said in a Facebook message, asking not to be named because their children are close friends.
The woman described Tella Sanford as “sweet and caring” and her husband, who was known in the community as Jake, as “always volunteering in the classroom, field trips, sports teams.”
“Jake had his moments, though,” she said. “He was known as a hot head.”
She recalled one instance about a year ago when he came to her and her husband’s home while a family member was watching their son to “scold” the boy “about a disagreement on the bus between his son and ours.”
She said she distanced herself from the Sanfords as a result.
In the days leading up to the attack, some who interacted with Sanford also said they had unnerving encounters with him.
Kris Johns, a candidate for the City Council in Burton, where Sanford had been living, said he was canvassing his neighborhood about a week before the incident and the two spoke for about 20 minutes.
Johns said Sanford told him he was an Iraq War veteran who had once lived in Utah and had been addicted to drugs. The conversation pivoted to firearms and the Second Amendment, then the Latter-day Saints, Johns added, as Sanford spoke about the religion’s history and religious practices and his experience with the church.
“He had mentioned he had tattoos and how they wanted him to remove his tattoos for a religious ceremony,” said Johns, who isn’t a member of the Latter-day Saints church.
Johns said the line of questioning by Sanford grew “narrow and further sharper” until he explained his belief that “Mormons are the Antichrist.”
Sanford wasn’t angry, Johns recalled. The conversation eventually ended, Johns said, and he left the property waving to Sanford.
“Nothing he said was indicative of a threat,” Johns said.
But two days before the church shooting, a friend of Sanford’s said she and her teenage daughter had an unusual encounter with him while he was driving in his truck.
“We started to cross, and the truck, like, gunned its engine and came at us,” Kara Pattison told NBC affiliate WDIV of Detroit. “I blocked my daughter and we jumped back, and then the window rolled down, and it was Jake. He was laughing. He’s, like, ‘Oh, got you guys.’”
The scene stuck out in Pattison’s head — especially after she learned Sanford had been named as the shooter.
“He had never pretended to run us over before,” Pattison said, “so no, that wasn’t normal behavior.”
Pattison said her memories of Sanford were of a “fun-loving family guy.” She said he also spoke about certain groups of people “in ways that weren’t acceptable.” Authorities haven’t suggested that his political views or religious beliefs played a role in a motive.
Sanford’s father told NBC News in a statement Monday that he doesn’t know what to think about his son’s actions and asked for privacy as the community mourns.
“We are completely in shock over this,” Thomas Sanford said. “We have no answers.”