Fatal Shooting at Creflo Dollar’s World Changer’s Church
Thursday, October 25, 2012
By Hasan James
On Wednesday, a neatly dressed man walked into World Changers Church during a morning prayer service and opened fire, killing 39 year old father and husband, Greg McDowell.
“He walked in calmly, opened fire, and left as calmly,” Fulton County Police Cpl. Kay Lester said. Palmer was a former facilities maintenance employee at the church who resigned in August for “personal reasons,” Lester said.
Palmer was taken into custody without incident a few hours later at a Macy’s at a mall in Atlanta’s upscale Buckhead neighborhood, Lester said. Police spotted his black Subaru station wagon with tinted windows in the parking lot of Lenox Square but didn’t recover a weapon. Ironically, court records show that a Floyd Palmer born on the same day in 1960 was charged with attempted murder in 2001 and eventually served one year in prison in Baltimore, Maryland. Whether or not it is the same Floyd Palmer remains to be seen.
About 20 to 25 people were gathered in the chapel when the shooting happened. No other people were wounded and the gunman fled. Law enforecement officials are still trying to find out whether or not the two men knew one another or was this just a case of a killer gone mad.
Senior Pastor of World Changers Church, Creflo Dollar, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press, but he preached Wednesday evening at a Bible study in the campus’s larger World Dome sanctuary. “We pray for this family,” he said, referring to McDowell. “We pray for both families and then we pray for every family that’s in here tonight”, said Dollar.