God Was Right There: Pastor of Santa Fe Victim Says Teen’s Heroic Actions Were Unsurprising, Supernatural

He lost his life when the killer shot him through the door. Christian “Riley” Garcia, 15, held the door shut to buy time for other students to escape the Santa Fe High School shooter. His pastor’s not surprised he’s a hero. 

In an interview with The Stream, Pastor Keenan Smith described Riley as a polite, thoughtful person who went out of his way to help others. The pastor of Crosby Church in Crosby, Texas, said Riley jumped in to help without asking whenever needed.

He did that day. One girl whose life he saved said “He just knew what he needed to do and was doing it.”

Riley had supernatural help, Smith thinks. “I think it was supernatural, the hand of the Lord guiding and directing him. So, it’s not surprising but it is extremely humbling and extremely challenging.” He added that we should all say, “I want to be a little bit more like that.”

God Was With Riley

Just days ago, Smith said, Riley wrote a Bible verse on what would have been his bedroom door on the family’s new house being built in Santa Fe. The scripture was Psalm 46:10. “He wrote on the doorway, ‘Be still and know that I am God,’ [then] he braced a doorway shut to protect others and lost his life.”

God was with Riley. “I would say He was right there, He was right there every moment of it,” said Smith. At the funeral service he said”Evil tried to win, but heroes like Riley beat it back and was victorious.” Riley demonstrated Jesus’s words that “No greater love has someone than to lay down their life for a friend.” 

“The God of heaven gives us the ability to love beyond ourselves. So I would say He was right there.”

Deeper than Santa Fe

Smith believes the problem of school shootings goes much deeper than Santa Fe. “It’s never been about somebody picking up a weapon. It’s been about somebody who picked off a piece of fruit from a tree that God said, ‘Don’t do it.’ In direct defiance and disobedience to God, they picked the fruit from the tree and ate of it, refused to take responsibility and therefore never repented from it.”

As a culture, we need absolute brokenness and repentance toward God. “We are a stiff-necked people and we don’t want to repent. That’s just my prayer, that people would start to feel more of a sense of brokenness and a need for God.”

The problems with society also came in part because the Ten Commandments were removed from schools. Smith mentioned the commandments, “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, honor your mother and father.” Jesus also said “love your neighbor as yourself.” We’ve removed the biblical and spiritual principles from our schools. “We stop teaching our kids that these are absolutes, and then we wonder why things like this take place.”

Riley and his family knew the absolutes. They read the Bible and prayed together each night. The night before the shooting, Riley read Matthew 5:16-20: “Let your life so shine before men so they will see your good works and they will glorify your Father, which is in heaven.” That’s what he was doing when he held a door shut so others could escape.