Senior Center Pastor Fatally Shot Retired Minister, Fled in Motorized Wheelchair: Cops

CHICAGO — A 67-year-old South Shore senior center resident is accused of shooting a retired Baptist minister and then fleeing in his motorized wheelchair after a possible religious discussion turned fatal early Monday morning, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Ted Merchant is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of fellow assisted living center resident Allen Smith, 80. Merchant was apprehended at about 1:05 p.m. Monday, Sept. 5, about three blocks away, according to the Tribune.

Smith and Merchant were sitting on the patio at the Senior Suites of Rainbow Beach assisted living center, 2804 E. 77th Place, when the shooting occurred, the report stated. Police didn't reveal what caused Merchant to pull a gun on Smith, but a surveillance camera recorded the killing, the report added. Residents told police that both men regularly met to discuss religion and the Bible.

"They’d talk about Bible passages and ideas about God," Dorothy Hull, a 76-year-old resident at the center, told the Tribune. "They always had little arguments going on about things like that."

Smith, who had only been at the center for about a year, graduated from Yale Divinity School in Connecticut, where he also help start a church, the Tribune reports. After that, Smith became a senior pastor in the First Baptist Church in East Chicago, according to the report.

A resident at Senior Suites for six years, Merchant started and ran his own ministry, Straight Gate, and held Sunday services in the facility's community room, the report stated. He called himself a reverend and a pastor and was known for trying to recruit other residents to his ministry, the report added.

More via the Chicago Tribune

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