A former UNT professor's retirement dream was shattered Sunday when police said Jim Adkisson, angry about a church's liberal views, shot nine people, killing two and destroying a friendship.

From a corner chair in his hospital room, Joe Barnhart, 76, was explicit while talking about the terror he witnessed Sunday.

"There was this horrendous explosion,” he said. “You knew it wasn't firecrackers, but you didn't know what it was."

It was a shotgun blast inside a Knoxville, Tennessee church Sunday morning.

Barnhart's good friend, 61-year-old Linda Kraeger, collapsed to the floor. She was the first one shot while sitting two seats away in the second row.

"I, apparently, was going down to see what I could do for her,” he said. “That's when he shot me. Luckily he didn't hit me in the head. He hit me in the back."

More than 20 shotgun pellets hit Barnhart in the back. Some of the pellets penetrated his lungs.

After he was wounded, Barnhart collapsed to the floor next to Kraeger.

"I thought, 'Linda looks dead and I'm dying,'” he said. “Then I thought, 'I can't breathe and this is the way it is to die.'"

Unfortunately, Kraeger did die.

Barnhart is recovering. Tuesday, he wore a blue hospital gown and a gauze bandage that covered a wound on his collarbone to the right of his throat. One shotgun pellet, Barnhart said, lodged itself close to an artery and doctors told him they would not remove it fearing the procedure would be too risky and could paralyze him.

Barnhart and his wife convinced Kraeger and her husband to move with them from North Texas to East Tennessee last September. The couples left Denton, which was where Barnhart had been a professor of philosophy and religion at UNT for 40 years.

Sharing his expertise, he often appeared in interviews, including several with News 8 during the '90s.

In Denton, both the Barnharts and the Kraegers attended Denton's Unitarian Universalist Church. The Barnharts retired to Tennessee to be closer to the Barnhart's granddaughters, who were also at the service Sunday morning but were not hurt.

Chloe, 6, was sitting next to her mother, Linda Chavez. Chavez was shot and is also at the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville. Chloe was not hurt.

Barnhart’s other granddaughter, 14-year-old Tori, was in the church’s musical performance that morning and was not hurt either.

E-mail jwhitely@wfaa.com