Man Held in Killing of Kansas Abortion Provider

National Pro-Life Groups Condemn Slaying

By Jeremy Reynalds
Correspondent, ASSIST News Service

June 2009

A 51-year-old man was in a Kansas jail Monday, held on suspicion of first-degree murder in the killing of a physician whose women's clinic frequently took center stage in the debate over abortion, authorities said.

Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed while serving as an usher at his Wichita, Kansas, church Sunday morning, according to police. Tiller was one of the few U.S. physicians who still perform late-term abortions. He had survived a 1993 shooting outside his clinic.

CNN reported that Scott Roeder, 51, from the Kansas City, Kansas, area is being held without bond in the Sedgwick County Adult Detention Facility, according to the sheriff's office Web site. In addition to the murder charge, he also faces two counts of aggravated assault. Police said they believe he acted alone.

"This is a tragedy for the Tiller family. We feel so badly about that," Clarence Roeder, the suspect's uncle, said in a statement provided to CNN affiliate KMBC. "That Scott would murder the doctor in the Lutheran Church. We are also Lutherans, and it adds a double touch of sadness and irony."

Roeder is expected to appear in court early this week, CNN reported law enforcement officials said.
The attack drew condemnation from Tiller supporters and from national pro-life organizations, CNN said.
"This guy is not one of us, and if he thinks he is, then he is deluded," said the Rev. Gary Cass, director of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission. "I and so many others have been fighting in the movement within the parameters of the law, and all this does is paint us in a broad, awful stroke."

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler agreed. While strongly denouncing abortion, he said in an article on his web site that Roeder's alleged action was "immoral, unjustified, and horribly harmful to the pro-life cause. Now, the premeditated murder of Dr. George Tiller in the foyer of his church is the headline scandal -- not the abortions he performed and the cause he represented."

Mohler added, "We have no right to take the law into our own hands in an act of criminal violence. We are not given the right to take this power into our own hands, for God has granted this power to governing authorities. The horror of abortion cannot be rightly confronted, much less corrected, by means of violence and acts outside the law and lawful means of remedy. This is not merely a legal technicality -- it is a vital test of the morality of the pro-life movement."

CNN said according to at least one protester who knows him, Roeder has a history of protesting at abortion clinics. While a man with his name appears to have posted a message in 2007 about Tiller on Operation Rescue's web site, the group's president, Troy Newman, issued a statement saying, "We deplore the criminal actions with which Mr. Roeder is accused."

The statement also said, "Scott Roeder has never been a member, contributor, or volunteer with Operation Rescue. Mr. Roeder may have posted to our open blog web site, as have thousands of members of the public, including those with pro-abortion views, but he is not affiliated with this organization."

It also read, "The pro-life ethic is to value all human life from the moment of conception until natural death. Operation Rescue has diligently and successfully worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see to it that abortionists around the nation are brought to justice. Without due process, there can be no justice. In spite of these horrific events, we remain dedicated to working through all peaceful and legal means available to bring an end to the killing of innocent children through abortion."

A man named Scott Roeder was convicted in 1996 of criminal use of explosives and sentenced to 24 months probation, Topeka, Kansas, authorities told CNN.

CNN said around that time, Regina Dinwiddie, a 54-year-old grandmother, met Roeder and got to know him as a regular outside abortion clinics.

Dinwiddie said that in 1996 she and Roeder were protesting at a Kansas Planned Parenthood center and that Roeder went inside and demanded to see the doctor. When the doctor came into the lobby, Roeder approached him and said, "Now I know what you look like," she told CNN.

"Scott came out and told us that he had done that, and we all said, 'Scott, you better leave or they are gonna get after you,'" CNN reported Dinwiddie said. "Next thing, all these people come rushing out of the place, all worried. Scott was standing up for what he believed in."

"Absolutely, what happened to Tiller was justified," CNN reported the grandmother said. "He (Tiller) forfeited his life by taking the lives of innocent children."

It's that sentiment which frightens Dr. Suzanne Poppema, who used to provide abortions. She is the board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health on which Tiller served between 2002 and 2006.

"All of us (abortion providers) honestly believed that because it had been years since someone had been hurt, we thought that the true crazy, violent anti-abortionists were fewer," CNN reported she said. "That was clearly overly optimistic. Now you think, do I make sure I get body guards or have a federal marshal everywhere I go?"

CNN said the shooting prompted U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to direct federal marshals to "offer protection to other appropriate people and facilities around the nation," according to a statement from the Department of Justice.

"However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence," CNN reported Obama said in a statement issued by the White House.

Tiller was killed shortly after 10 a.m. Sunday. Police found him lying dead in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, where he had been serving as an usher.

CNN said that according to Wichita police spokesman Gordon Bassham, witnesses provided a description of the gunman's car and a license plate number. Police stopped a blue Ford Taurus matching the description about three hours later in Gardner, about 30 miles southwest of Kansas City, and arrested the driver.

"We think we have the right person arrested," said Wichita Police Deputy Chief Tom Stoltz. "We will investigate this suspect to the Nth degree -- his history, his family, his associates -- and we are just in the beginning stages of that."

Tiller had practiced medicine for nearly 40 years, said Peter Brownlie, president of the Kansas City-based regional Planned Parenthood office.

The doctor and his staff had been picketed for years, with some activists distributing leaflets around his neighborhood, CNN reported Brownlie said. His clinic suffered serious damage from a bomb in 1985, and he was shot through both arms in 1993 by an anti-abortion activist who is now in federal prison.

Additionally, 15 years ago, Tiller's name appeared atop a "hit list" that was circulated among some pro-life groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Jeremy Reynalds is a freelance writer and the founder and director of Joy Junction, New Mexico's largest emergency homeless shelter, http://www.joyjunction.org or http://www.christianity.com/joyjunction. He has a master's degree in communication from the University of New Mexico, and a Ph.D. in intercultural education from Biola University in Los Angeles. His newest book is "Homeless in the City: A Call to Service." Additional details about "Homeless" are available at http://www.HomelessBook.com He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For more information contact: Jeremy Reynalds at jeremyreynalds@comcast.net. Tel: (505) 877-6967 or (505) 400-7145. Note: A higher resolution JPEG picture of Jeremy Reynalds is available on request from Dan Wooding at danjuma1@aol.com.