On Sunday morning, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints woke to the news that Russell M. Nelson—the leader of their faith, and a man they considered a prophet of God—had died. The sadness of the news was tempered somewhat by its foreseeability. Nelson, who had recently celebrated his 101st birthday, was the oldest living global religious leader, and he spoke freely about his own mortality. “At this point,” he said in a 2022 speech, “I have stopped buying green bananas.”

I had interviewed Nelson several years earlier for The Atlantic, and the late prophet was on my mind Sunday morning as I drove my family to our Latter-day Saint ward in Northern Virginia. After the sacrament meeting, I walked two of my kids to the Primary room, where they’d been given small assignments in that day’s children’s program. As the kids began to sing, I heard a fellow congregant behind me say, “There’s an active shooter at an LDS church.”

A quick glance at my phone revealed a stream of nightmarish news alerts from Grand Blanc, Michigan: Witnesses were reporting that a man had crashed his pickup truck into a Mormon chapel, opened fire on the congregation with an assault rifle, and set the building on fire. Early details were sketchy—the number of victims varied; some reports mentioned homemade explosive devices.