Munday, Texas ? A Texas oil company supervisor gunned down in Yemen was a kind, generous man who helped the needy in his small community, friends say.

Ronald Horsch, 65, a foreman for Dallas-based Hunt Oil Co., was one of three oil rig workers — along with a Canadian and a Yemeni — killed by a Yemeni gunman Tuesday. A fourth man, also a Canadian, was injured and flown to a nearby hospital.

Horsch, a native of Wellington, Kan., was supervising an oil rig owned and operated by Nabors Drilling International. The attack occurred at an oil field in the northern province of Marib, about 100 miles northeast of the Yemeni capital San’a.

The assailant, identified by the Yemeni Interior Ministry as Naji Abdullah al-Kumaim, had worked for Nabors for seven years and suffered from depression. He committed suicide after the shooting.

Hunt officials said the company had suspended oil operations in Yemen “for the foreseeable future.”

Horsch spent every other month in Texas and the rest of the time in Yemen. He had volunteered for the overseas job and had worked as a supervisor there for several years.

“He liked it in Yemen and loved to work on the rigs,” another Hunt Oil foreman Roger Rosencranz, 51, told the Wichita Falls Times Record News. “His motto was ‘I love my job.”‘

Horsch came to Texas from Kansas for the oil job, Rosencranz said.

Tuesday night, Horsch’s three sons and daughter were driving to pick up their mother in Knox City and then drive back to Wellington for the funeral, he said. Horsch’s widow, Gloria, declined comment.

Funeral arrangements are pending the return of his body, which may not arrive until Friday or later, said his brother, Mike Horsch.

“It is a shocker — especially the way he died,” Mike Horsch said.

Horsch, the son of Paul and Marie Horsch of Wellington, was the oldest of 14 children, said Kristi Horsch, Mike’s wife.

Before he went into the oil business, Horsch farmed near Oxford. He also worked in an oil field near Wellington before transferring to Texas.

“It is just hard to believe — we are still kind of in shock,” Kristi Horsch said.

The family first found out about the shooting from news reports. “We were thinking Ronnie needs to get out of there, and then we found it was him,” she said.

Kristi Horsch said the family has since learned the assailant apparently went to the wrong oil rig, and that Horsch was not even that man’s supervisor.

Friends say Horsch was quick to help others in Munday, a town of some 1,500 residents about 50 miles north of Abilene.

“He helped widowed women make repairs to their homes, whatever was necessary,” said Brad Huckabee, pastor at Harvest Christian Fellowship Church in Munday. “He was a very generous man.”

Huckabee said that he and Horsch talked about the dangers of working in Yemen.

“He was always aware of the danger but wasn’t concerned about it,” he said.