BUFFALO, N.Y. (WBEN) Almost a week after a mass shooting that forever changed 13 families and left the entire Buffalo community shattered, the subject is starting to be discussed.
Can the 18 year old gunman, accused of carrying out a racially motivated hate crime that killed ten people, be forgiven?
"In Ecclesiastes, it says there is a time for every purpose under the heavens,"
said the Reverend Kinzer Pointer, Pastor of Liberty Missionary Baptist Church
on WBEN Friday.
"As Christians, forgiveness has to be where we're headed." Adding, "there's no timetable for when we have to arrive there." He said he's willing to let people work through all of their other stages to arrive at forgiveness.
Rev. Pointer said, "we'll get there, because that's who we are. And those are the principals that we have decided and chosen to live by."
Jeffrey Peace is an administrator at the State Tabernacle Church of God on Glenwood Avenue in Buffalo. He worked closely with deacon and deceased shooting victim Heyward Patterson for several years. CNN's Brian Todd asked Peace how the man who was so loved and trusted in the church community would have responded to his killer?
"The gunman was clearly full of hatred. Do you think Deacon Patterson
might forgive this man if he were able to ?," asked Todd.
"The bible tells us to forgive. It tells us to forgive. I can't speak for him. He's gone. But if he survived, yes, I would say yes. And we are going to have to forgive the gunman because we're here," Peace added.
Penny Beckham, a friend of Deacon Patterson, told Sky News this week that
it was hard to pull into the parking lot last Sunday, because she always parked right next to the deacon. "I could picture him forgiving his killer," she said.
I can picture him telling us to go on and praise God. I can picture him telling us to keep the mantle going. That's the kind of person he was. He would want his friends to forgive the man who killed him," she added.
