A pastor in Brooklyn, New York, was robbed at gunpoint by three men while he livestreamed a sermon Sunday, according to a story from silive.com.
The men kicked open the back door to the sanctuary a few minutes into Bishop Lamor Whitehead’s message and made their way toward him with guns drawn, the video shows.
The thieves stole $400,000 worth of jewelry off Whitehead and his wife, the pastor said.
“I said, ‘Alright, alright, alright,’ pretty much stating that I’m not going to do anything because I know you’re coming for me. You’re coming straight to me. I don’t want my parishioners hurt. I’ve got women and children there,” Whitehead, of Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministries, said.
“When I see them come into the sanctuary with their guns, I told everybody, ‘Get down,’” Whitehead said in a video posted on Instagram. “I didn’t know if they wanted to shoot my church up or if they were coming for a robbery.”
“As I got down, one went to my wife and took all her jewelry and had the gun in front of my 8-month-old baby’s face. Took off my bishop’s ring, my wedding band and took off my bishop’s chain, and then I had chains underneath my robe and he started tapping my neck to see if anything else. So that means they knew. They watched and they knew that I have other jewelry,” he explained.
“I was born without jewelry, jewelry don’t make me,” Whitehead said after the attack in a live video to his 1.3 million Instagram followers.
According to police, three “unidentified individuals entered the location, robbed the victim and fled the scene in a white Mercedes traveling Eastbound on Avenue D.”
Whitehead has been in the media recently — in May, he tried to broker the surrender of Andrew Abdullah, the man arrested in the shooting and killing of a passenger on a New York subway train.
Abdullah has pleaded not guilty to the charges.