Shotgun Slayings in L.A. Church Sanctuary : Death Follows Grim Prophecy

In retrospect, it seems, Patronella Luke’s was a death foretold.

All week, the children of Mt. Olive Church of God in Christ had been studying the Bible in a small chapel next to the main sanctuary on a corner in Southeast Los Angeles. Friday night, during commencement ceremonies, the pastor, the Rev. J. C. Brewster, taught a chilling, although apparently unintentional, lesson about prophecy.

In a voice audible to the entire congregation of about 50 people, he praised 33-year-old Peter Luke, who was sitting near the front. Then Brewster told 35-year-old Patronella (Pat) Luke, who was in the last row, to stand by her husband and support him.

From this point, recollections differ. By one account, the minister told the couple, “The Lord is going to take one of you.” By another, he said, “The Lord is going to use one of you.” By yet another, “God is going to get one of you.”

Man Bursts In

The pastor said he did not mean to foreshadow anybody’s murder.

But as the ceremony ended, a man burst in, clad in a black sweat suit, its hood pulled tight around the ski mask hiding his face. He brandished a sawed-off shotgun. He walked down the aisle, slowly, calmly, deliberately, turned around near the pulpit and walked back, stopping at Pat Luke’s pew.

The gunman trained his weapon on the people in the pew. Pat’s mother, Vivian Worthen, raised her hand. “The blood of Jesus!” she shouted. Then, Worthen said, the first pellets missed their mark. Pellets from the second shot, she said, grazed her left shoulder and slammed into Pat’s temple. Pat was gone.

When the shooting ended, 76-year-old Mae Lee was dead, too, shot as she ran in fright toward the bathroom. Peter Luke was wounded in the leg and slightly in the arm.

Saturday, as Peter Luke was in surgery at California Medical Center in Los Angeles, police and parishioners tried to sort out the mystery. There were no suspects and no known motive. Who, they wondered, was the man in black and why did he pick that time, that place?

“I wish I knew the reason,” Brewster said. “I’d feel better. I could have some release.”

Church, after all, was supposed to be a sanctuary. Mt. Olive had always seemed to live up to that ideal. Although gangs and drugs were far from unknown in the graffiti-sprayed neighborhood surrounding the stucco building with its stained-glass windows, local gang members had told the pastor they’d help if he ever had any trouble. No gang slogans were ever scrawled across the church walls and a year had passed since the police had cleaned out the narcotics traffic in the alley in back.

“Once, as I was coming in, a guy asked me if I wanted to buy some drugs,” said church secretary Olevia Hart, who is the pastor’s sister-in-law. “A gang member came up and told him to leave me alone.”

Brewster has not been particularly active in fighting drugs and gangs in the community, which has become largely Latino as blacks, including most of the 200 church members, moved away. “We don’t get on a soap box. That’s not our ministry,” Hart said. “We’re against everything the Bible is against, but we don’t single anything out.”

Veteran Police Shocked

The idea of murders in a church shocked even veteran police officers who had seen many strange things over the years. “It’s crazy,” said Police Officer Andy Thedford, who has been on the force for 21 years. “It makes you want to rent an apartment on the moon.”

This was not, however, the first time for such violence in the Los Angeles area. In 1987, a bullet splintered the stained-glass window of a Baptist church in Watts, killing a choir member walking down the aisle after rehearsal. In 1986, a man described as despondent over the end of his engagement opened fire with an automatic pistol inside a La Puente Church of Christ. He killed two church members and wounded two others.

In 1985, a man fatally shot a pastor and a deacon inside a Chinatown Baptist church. A former church member, he was shot to death in a gunfight with an off-duty Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who had been attending the service with members of his San Fernando Valley congregation.

These incidents, and now the Mt. Olive shootings, have frightened ministers. “We’re so vulnerable to violence,” said Lloyd Johnson, of Harmony Missionary Baptist Church in South-Central Los Angeles. “I’m afraid something like this will make some people start coming to church armed . . . with guns. I hope they won’t, but in a city like this, somebody’s going to do it.”

Mt. Olive church members do not believe that gangs had any connection to the murders in their chapel.

“I think it was a maniac. I think he found the people who were moving. The rest of the people were all on the floor,” Brewster said. “The one lady was running. The other was trying to get her mother to the floor . . . and I think the man was trying to save his wife.”

Stalking the Lukes?

Others wonder if the gunman was stalking the Lukes.

“It seemed like he was almost looking for somebody,” Hart said.

“This guy was a cold-blooded murderer,” said another church member. “I’d say he was a hit man, not a gang member. He just came in there like he owned the place.”

But no one could figure out why the Lukes would be targets. Both had long been active in the church. She was a soprano who had traveled around the country and to Europe with the Albert McNeil Singers, excited about her invitation to sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in the fall. He is a computer technician who goes from the couple’s home in Southwest Los Angeles to the neighborhood where he grew up, near 41st Street and Compton Boulevard, to try to talk addicts into giving up drugs.

Their marriage of seven years seemed strong. Recently, said Lorna Luke, Peter Luke’s mother, the two were teasing each other, talking about who would die first. The husband said he would. “Pat was saying she would. She wanted to go first,” Lorna Luke said, “because she didn’t think she could stand to see him go.”

Some congregants told police investigators and reporters about a squabble that Pat Luke’s cousin was having with her husband. The cousin was also a church member; the husband had been in the past. The cousin had obtained a court order Friday to keep her husband away, because he had allegedly been threatening her.

In a telephone interview from his hospital bed, Peter Luke declined to comment on the quarrel. He said, however, that the gunman was taller than the cousin’s husband.

Approach the Church

Witnesses said the gunman and another armed man in black approached the church about 9 p.m. One man, a church member who was on the porch outside the chapel, said the gunman came up the stairs and muttered an obscenity. The church member jumped off the porch and ran, but said the gunman fired three shots at him, then entered the chapel.

The second man in black stayed outside, witnesses said.

In the church, the awards and certificates for completing the Bible course already had been handed out. The choir had sung “Jesus Loves Me,” the older children had performed a skit and the younger children, including the Lukes’ 5-year-old “Peter Two,” had answered questions about the doctrine they’d learned that week.

The pastor had just finished his remarks--including his message to the Lukes. He doesn’t recall what his exact words were. “In my discourse when I speak, I sometimes don’t remember what I even said,” Brewster said. “When your love goes out, you just say it.”

“God puts words in his mouth and he speaks them,” said his wife, Julia.

As the gunman moved into the chapel, the congregants dove for cover. “I thought I better get my wallet out and give it to him,” one deacon said. Many of the 30 or so children, ranging in age from 4 to 15, cried and shouted for their mothers.

Underneath the pew where 13-year-old Estela Lopez was hiding, “I just closed my eyes and started praying,” she said.

She Ran and Was Killed

Pat Luke was shot. Mae Lee, mother of six, a regional official of the Church of God in Christ who led intense, three-day prayer sessions and often took meals to Skid Row, ran and was shot.

Peter Luke saw the man point the gun at him. He prayed “Lord protect me” and was shot.

“My children! My children!” Worthen screamed.

Donald Luke was watching an 11 p.m. news show on television when he realized he had just seen his brother being wheeled away on a stretcher. “That’s Peter!” he yelled, shocked. He telephoned his mother to let her know what had happened.

The next day, Worthen told little “Peter Two” about the results of the frightening incident they had both witnessed. “I told him his father was going to be operated on and his mother had gone to be with Jesus in heaven and if he was a good boy, he would see her,” she said. The boy said he understood and asked if there was going to be a funeral.

About noon, the Rev. Tobe Sneed of Mt. Olive came to open the church building while a squad car stood guard across the street. Blood stained the floor. Blood soaked a maroon choir gown that had been used to cover one of the victims and now lay crumpled between two overturned pews. Blood splattered a cardboard fan, with a funeral home advertisement, that had been used to cool a congregant during the sultry evening before. Times staff writers Andrea Ford and George Stein contributed to this article.