The Grand Blanc Sacrament Meeting Attack — Tender Mercies That Kept a Worse Tragedy From Happening (2025)

On Sunday morning, September 28, 2025, a gunman motivated by hatred of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — confirmed by the FBI as a targeted anti-religious attack — rammed his pickup truck through the front of the Grand Blanc, Michigan, chapel during sacrament meeting, opened fire on the congregation with an assault rifle, and used gasoline to set the building ablaze. Four members were killed — Craig Hayden, William 'Pat' Howard, John Bond, and Thelma Armstrong — and nine were hospitalized, with the historic meetinghouse burned to the ground.

Yet members of the Grand Blanc ward, and the nation that followed the story, marveled at how much worse the death toll should have been. A Michigan Department of Natural Resources conservation officer happened to witness the crash and was on the scene within thirty seconds; he killed the gunman in an exchange of fire. Grand Blanc Township Police Chief William Renier's review of the body-cam footage showed that only three minutes and forty-seven seconds elapsed from dispatch to the neutralizing of the threat. Seventy-eight-year-old Pat Howard, a Vietnam veteran, instinctively rushed the attacker to stop his assault and died defending his congregation. Benjamin Phelps, an ordinance worker at the Detroit Temple, deliberately drew the gunfire away from the children and, though severely wounded, refused to leave, working to get others out; as he lay injured on the lawn he waved his wife on so she could get their own children to safety.

Dr. Bridger Frampton, an emergency medicine resident and National Guard flight surgeon, initially believed the crash was an accident and ran toward the danger to help. As gunshots continued he joined an Army veteran and a Marine to carry a wounded man from the foyer, then broke windows to reach those trapped inside — nine people came out through the third window alone. When his ten-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son were still missing, he felt an unmistakable prompting to call a man he had never once telephoned before; that man was at the family pavilion and quickly found both children, bringing a reunion Frampton called joyous — 'a reunion that I wish four other families could have experienced that day.' He later realized that his children had left their seats despite being told to sit tight — and that had they obeyed, he would have buried all four of them. Frampton himself was intubated for four days from smoke inhalation but recovered. 'There should be more of our congregation dead,' he said. 'We saw a lot of miracles, but we also saw a lot of pain and suffering from our friends. Grief and gratitude can coexist more than I ever realized.'

For the congregation and for Latter-day Saints everywhere, the attack became a witness that God's tender mercies attend his people even in the midst of violence — visible in the officer who arrived in thirty seconds, in men who faced the gunman to protect children not their own, in a father's prompting that found his children, and in dozens of members and first responders through whom, as survivors insist, far more lives were preserved than taken.