'Me, the gunman and God'

Facing the killer who had opened fire at her church, Jeanne Assam gripped her handgun and asked God for help.

“I just prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide me. I said, ‘Holy Spirit, please be with me,’” said Assam, 42. “My hands weren’t even shaking.”

The volunteer security guard at New Life Church credits God for helping her bring down the gunman who shot five parishioners Sunday afternoon.

“God was with me,” Assam said. “He never left my side.”

Colorado Springs police and church officials say if Assam hadn’t shot Matthew Murray, a lot more people could have been killed at New Life.

“If we did not have an armed person on our campus, 50 to 100 people could have lost their lives yesterday,” said New Life Pastor Brady Boyd.

Facing dozens of reporters and television cameras, Assam stepped up to the lectern at the Colorado Springs Police Operations Center on Monday afternoon to applause.

Sunday morning, before she went to church, Assam had read on the Internet about the shootings earlier at an Arvada missionary training center. It gave her chills, she said, and she prayed for the safety of her church family.

Assam works full time for Messenger International, a local Christian ministry, but volunteers as a security guard at New Life, Boyd said. Assam said she has a background in law enforcement but declined to say where she’s worked.

She is a former Minneapolis police officer, according to WCCO-TV in Minneapolis. A police union official said she was fired because of a “truthfulness issue” and her termination was upheld by an arbitrator, the television station reported.

From Jan. 1 to June 30, she was a parole officer for the Colorado Department of Corrections, spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti said, declining to discuss why she left.

Assam said she’s been attending New Life for a few months.

About 1 p.m. Sunday, Assam was in the main hallway on the east side of the worship center when she heard gunshots.

“The shots were so loud, I thought he was inside,” Assam said.

Murray then came through the doors, and Assam took cover.

“I identified myself and engaged him and took him down,” said Assam, who described feeling weak as she approached him because she’d been fasting for three days.

“It just seemed like it was me, the gunman and God.”

She declined to give more details, including how many shots she fired or if Murray shot at her.

“I want to extend my sympathies to the families of the victims and the gunman. I mean that very sincerely,” Assam said.

Though the shooter had more firepower — Assam had a handgun, while Murray wielded an assault rifle — God kept her safe, Assam said.

“I did not run away, and I didn’t think for a minute to run away,” Assam said. “I was given the assignment to end this before it got too much worse.”

Boyd said Assam was a “hero” whose actions had averted further bloodshed. He said she is normally his personal security guard, but on Sunday she was stationed in the middle of a church rotunda, on the lookout for danger after reports of the shootings at the mission training center in Arvada earlier in the day.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0274 or jennifer.wilson@gazette.com