Newly released records reveal that Thomas Jacob Sanford, the man accused of ramming his truck into a Michigan church before opening fire and setting the building ablaze, called in his own emergency to dispatchers just minutes before the tragic incident that left four people dead and eight others injured at the Mormon church.

The documents from Gand Blanc Township Police were first released to ABC News and detail the harrowing eyewitness accounts from witnesses who were inside when the tragedy unfolded. Sanford reportedly called at least four minutes before the calls began to 911 about the church attack. 

Sanford, 40, was killed by law enforcement responding to the shooting.

Police reports showed that the bomb threat call came in at just gone 10.20am and "was identified from past calls as belonging to Thomas Jacob Sanford," according to the police reports. 

The report described the caller as a “male who made bomb threats towards several local area churches and specifically described Mormon churches as being important".

Police said the shooting began at 10.25am. One woman who suffered a gunshot wound told officers that she heard a loud bang about 15 to 20 minutes into the service. She thought she heard sounds “from outside the chapel toward the front of the building".

In the report, the woman reported that she heard someone from the congregation yell, ‘everyone leave now!’

As she started to head toward the exit, she "felt a pain in her right leg just above her knee" and "looked down and saw blood”, police noted in her report.

Other victims described seeing “debris flying as bullets hit objects in the hallway".