Bishop killed on his verandah - Son says ‘vengeance belongs to God’

A pastor who dedicated his life to faith and service, met a violent end at his home in Portmore, St Catherine, on Saturday.

He has been identified as Clinton Smith, 74, a bishop and justice of the peace of Portmore Gardens. Reports from the Portmore Criminal Investigations Branch are that about 7:35 p.m., Smith was at his residence with family members, when he was called out of his house by unknown persons. He responded to the call and went outside. Moments later his family heard loud explosions sounding like gunshots. Smith's body was discovered in the yard with gunshot wounds. He was transported to hospital where he was pronounced dead. No motive has yet been established for the killing.

When THE STAR arrived at the Smith family home yesterday, members of the Full Truth Church of God were gathered in mourning. Prayers filled the air, led by Sister Claudia Halliman, who called on divine vengeance.

"We come against the force of darkness... You promised to pay, you said we shouldn't fret ourselves because of evildoers," she declared. The grief was especially heavy for Elsie Smith, the pastor's wife, who stood on the very spot where her husband was brutally attacked--on her birthday. As church members formed a circle around her, the pain in their voices echoed their collective loss.

Rohan Smith, 49, struggled to make sense of his father's killing, recalling the life of service he led.

"He's a justice of the peace, an example for us. [He was] a dedicated minister with a ministry of more than 40 churches, and he's at the top of the church... A man of faith all his life," he said.

For decades, Smith pastored a church in Windsor Heights, Central Village, a volatile community where he never closed the church doors, even amid violence.

"That is how much he was respected... There's nothing happening in Central Village that has ever affected this church or him," Rohan said. He recalled hearing someone call his father by name and that his father responded 'Hello.'

"He came out, and right after, gunshots," Rohan recounted. Smith was in his small office on the verandah, where he conducted marriage counselling and humanitarian work.

"He lived a life serving," Rohan repeated, as if trying to make sense of the tragedy. "It's not a man that ever had any altercations with anybody. No kind of violent exchange, nothing." As a man of faith himself, Rohan is clinging to the spiritual foundation his father laid.

"Bad things do happen to people of God. We are not immune," he said. "The apostles, every single one of them, all but one suffered violent deaths. These men walked with Jesus." Rohan recalled that after arriving at the hospital, doctors were preparing to pronounce his father dead.

"As I stepped in, the Holy Spirit said to me, 'Vengeance is mine. I will repay, thus saith the Lord.'" He said he repeated it three times.

"The nurses, the doctor, the porters, they stopped what they were doing and looked at me," he said. "And then I started praying." Rohan said he now has to be strong for his mother and four sisters.

"The Bible says that the steps of a righteous man are ordered by the Lord. While the manner in which he died is gruesome, Paul wrote that the trials we face here on Earth are nothing compared to the glory that we will receive," he said.