Beloved small-town Catholic priest fatally shot inside church rectory as young schoolkids played nearby during recess: cops

A beloved small-town priest was gunned down at a Catholic church in Kansas Thursday afternoon by an unhinged Oklahoma gunman — just steps from where young students were playing outside the parish’s nearby school, according to police and reports.The fourth-graders heard gunfire erupt inside the rectory of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Seneca, where Gary Hermesch, 66, allegedly killed 57-year-old Rev.Raj “Arul” Balaswamy Carasala around 3 p.m., the Kansas City Star reported.Carasala was found bleeding outside his residence at the church and succumbed to his injuries at a local hospital, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation said.Hermesch, who lives in Tulsa but grew up around Seneca, allegedly walked over to the Nemaha County Sheriff’s Office, which employs his brother as a dispatcher, and surrendered, the news outlet reported.Seneca is about two hours northwest of Kansas City.

Hermesch was charged with first-degree murder, authorities said Friday.A motive was not revealed by investigators.Grieving residents in the town of roughly 2,100 said Hermesch was an area native who one man called “kind of a loner.”Local Jim Runnebaum also told the KC Star that the suspect also used to send in “kind of off-the-wall” letters to a local newspaper.Some of the missives bashed the Catholic church because it became too modern and called it the “fake Catholic church,” the outlet reported.He reportedly blamed Jewish people and the Second Vatican Council for hurting the church in a 2022 letter and in a 2021 letter compared President Trump with the late President John F.

Kennedy, who was the first Catholic elected to the Oval Office.“JFK was always ‘the man’, whether it be a debate, speech, press conference, or whatever, but not in the sense where he tried to ‘dominate and crush’ the way Trump does,” Hermesch wrote, per the KC Star.“Why? Because even though he obviously had a lot of trouble living up to it, he at least lived in a time when h...