Let God Judge the Murderer of Abortion Doctor, Minister Says

The first doctor slain during an anti-abortion protest since the procedure was legalized 20 years ago was buried Saturday in a snow-covered cemetery at his ancestral hometown.

His mourners were told to let God judge the person who took his life.

About 60 people gathered for the closed-casket service for Dr. David Gunn, which was delayed almost an hour by a fierce storm that closed most major highways leading to this tiny town in south-central Tennessee.

“What if a special ministry like David had is challenged?,” the Rev. C. Scott James asked the mourners. “Who is to condemn?

“Only God can judge,” he said.

Dozens of flower arrangements, many from women’s clinics and abortion-rights groups from across the country, lined the walls of the funeral parlor during the service.

Gunn, 47, was shot three times in the back with a .38-caliber revolver outside the Pensacola, Fla., Women’s Medical Services clinic Wednesday during an anti-abortion protest.

Michael Frederick Griffin, 31, a Pensacola chemical plant worker, is being held without bond on a murder charge.

Gunn, a father of two, was based in Eufaula, Ala., but traveled six days a week to clinics in Georgia, Alabama and Florida to perform abortions.

He grew up in Benton, Ky., but his grandparents were from Winchester. His mother, Mae Trevathan Gunn, said she thought her son’s battle with childhood polio prompted him to be a doctor.

“He was a fighter. After all he overcame, I think it made him want to help other people,” said Ms. Gunn, who did not know until her son’s death that he performed abortions.

“I didn’t know he’d stopped delivering babies,” she said. “He never told us.”

David Gunn Jr., 22, an English major at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, said his father stopped delivering babies in part because of high liability insurance premiums, but also because he wanted to help women in need of safe abortions.

“There weren’t many places for women in states like Alabama to go. It’s a legal procedure, but women weren’t going to people qualified to do them,” he said. “He thought women deserved better than that.”

Gunn said his father had recently changed his routes to work and had said threats against him were increasing.

“I asked him was it worth it and if he was afraid that somebody would make good on the threats,” his son said. “He told me not to worry about it and that it wouldn’t come to that.

“I guess he had too much faith in people.”