Mansfield, Tex. ? Less than a year from retirement, William E. Koehn died doing what he loved, running a Baptist hospital and making toys for the needy in Yemen, his son-in-law said.

The 60-year-old hospital director, who attended Kansas University in the early 1960s, was one of three Americans killed Monday at Jibla Baptist Hospital in the Yemeni city of Jibla.

The others were a physician from Alabama and a hospital purchasing agent from Wisconsin. A pharmacist from Texas was wounded.

Koehn’s son-in-law, Randal Pearce, said Koehn “died doing what he was called to do.”

“There are always concerns, but he knew why he was there. He was there to help people, and he felt safe,” Pearce said Monday, standing outside his home in Mansfield, about 15 miles southeast of Fort Worth.

Koehn, a native of La Crosse, Kan., who moved with wife, Marty, to Yemen in 1975, made hundreds of wooden toy cars for orphans. The couple planned to retire to Texas next October to be near their children. His wife was not in the room during the shooting and was not injured, relatives said.

Koehn earned a bachelor’s degree in business from Fort Hays State in Hays, Kan., and attended KU and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo. He was a manager at a supermarket while living in Hays.

Also killed was Dr. Martha C. Myers, who had lived in Yemen 24 years, said her father Ira Myers, the retired director of the Alabama Department of Public Health.

“She loved the people very much,” Myers said. “She felt like that was home. She had the opportunity to talk to the native women. That would not have been possible for a male doctor in that culture. She delivered lots of babies.”

Myers said his daughter also helped UNICEF with immunization programs.

The third victim, Baptist aid worker Kathleen Gariety, from Wauwatosa, Wis., had been in Yemen about 10 years. Her family tried to persuade her this summer to stay in Wisconsin.

“We tried hard to get her to stay home. She wouldn’t hear of that,” said her brother, Jerome J. Gariety Jr., of Colgate, Wis. “I didn’t want her to go, but I think what really took her back was the children. She loved the children.”

One of Gariety’s sisters, Mary Naylor of Oconomowoc, Wis., said she always feared something would happen to her sister in Yemen. But she didn’t think it would happen inside the hospital compound.

“It’s just so hard to believe — not unexpected, but hard,” Naylor said.

Hospital pharmacist Donald W. Caswell, 49, who grew up in Levelland, about 30 miles west of Lubbock, was recovering from surgery for a stomach wound.