The day after leading a prayer at a Ted Cruz rally in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, pastor Tim Remington was found shot as many as six times in the parking lot of his Altar Church.
Police identified Kyle Andrew Odom, 30, as a suspect in the case. Officials did not speculate on a motive, but did hold out the possibility that the shooting was connected to the pastor’s participation in the Ted Cruz political rally. Odom is being considered “armed and dangerous.”
“We’ve been waiting for somebody who represented God for a long time,” Remington said during the Cruz rally. “We are here to pray that God’s will be done.”
Now members of his church are asking for prayers for Remington as he fights to survive the gunshots, one of which was to his head.
“One of the bullets TRIED to enter the brain but stopped at the skull,” Remington friend Roger Crigger wrote on Facebook. “Emergency room [technicians] and [doctors] are calling this a miracle, I’m saying, by today’s worldly standards it IS a miracle.”
But some members of Altar Church wondered if the shooting was a result of Pastor Remington’s work with convicted drug addicts and other people from the streets.
The church website explains that ministry saying, “It was there they became interested in street ministry and the people that are typically ignored; those who have problems with drugs, alcohol, and perversion. The street ministry days, from San Bernardino to L.A., taught Tim more about drugs and alcohol than all the education he ever had.”
“He opens his home to people. He takes them in and lets them live in his home. All the people society has turned their backs on, he reaches out to them,” one church member said of the pastor.
Surveillance video of the shooting shows Odom walking up behind the pastor at 2 pm on Sunday, March 6, and apparently opening fire from behind without saying a word of warning.
It appears Remington was very lucky and is expected to make a full recovery.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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