Someplace you'd think you should be safe

If asked where they thought they might feel safest, I suspect most people would answer either in their home or in their church. And while we all want our homes to be safe, it's pretty well known that homes can be - and are - broken in to on a sadly regular basis. In a church, though, most people expect that they won't have to worry about being the victims of crime. Sure, it happens, but we generally think of it as an abberation, and as a result, crimes that happen in churches still have the power to shock.

Last weekend, one of the more shocking of church crimes happened. In a small church - only 50 members - a little over half of them decided to stay after the service, mingle and have coffee - a time honoured church tradition if there ever was one. In addition to the coffee and snacks one usually expects to find at these gatherings, though, at least 16 parishoners were also served arsnic.

State investigators said today that arsenic found in coffee served on Sunday in a church just north of here had been put there deliberately and that they were treating the death of one man who drank the coffee as a homicide.

Fifteen people remained hospitalized, five of them in serious or critical condition, after drinking the same coffee at a church council meeting at the Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church in New Sweden, a former potato-farming town of 651 people about 20 miles from the Canadian border.

Now, crimes in churches aren't unheard of. It happens. Generally, though, the crimes committed are aimed at someone in specific or for a specific reason. There have been shootings at gay churches because of the criminal's hatred of gays, shooters who have come in during church services to kill someone in particular, and cases of ministers committing murder, most commonly of their spouse, for all the same reasons anyone else has. And, of course, there have also been the church sex-abuse scandals.

But a crime like this - where there is, so far, no clear intended victim, and a certain randomness to who was affected (only those who drank the coffee) - is fairly rare within a church, and for that reason, more frightening than many others. In time, we may learn that it's not as random as it first appears, but cases like this tend to be difficult to crack unless the killer does something to give the game away.

Posted by thorswitch at May 2, 2003 10:45 AM | TrackBack