A pastor and his wife were found fatally shot one week after they tied the knot.
The pair were found with gunshot wounds outside a home on the 12000 block of Summit Circle Run near West Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday morning.
A woman outside the home said the female victim was her 45-year-old sister who had gotten married on her birthday last Saturday.
‘She has never been as happy as she was now,’ the woman told WPTV and shared the couple’s wedding photo, in which they both wore blue and smiles.
The woman said her sister, from Haiti, was training to be a nurse practitioner and that her husband was a pastor. She added that three of her sister’s children were inside the home at the time of the shooting, as well as an adult who witnessed the incident.
Deputies got to the scene shortly after 8.30am, said Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Teri Barbera.
‘I heard what sounded like gunshots, but I thought people were just working on someone’s roof so I ignored it and went into the house,’ a neighbor, Dicter Pineda, told WPTV.
‘And then later when I went back outside that’s when I saw all the police activity out here.’
Another neighbor told the TV station she was shocked to hear of the shooting because ‘it’s pretty quiet’ in the area.
‘We don’t have too many things over here so I don’t know how this happened,’ said Deanne Germeil, who went to the same church as the victims.
Detectives interviewed and arrested Sony Josaphat as a person of interest. He has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Josaphat made his initial court appearance on Sunday morning and is being held without bond at Palm Beach County Jail.
The victims have not been named because their relatives invoked a law in Florida that prevents victims of crime from being identified.
They were shot dead a day before a Catholic priest at St John the Baptist church in Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, was stabbed to death in the rectory hours before Sunday mass.
A pastor and his wife were found with gunshot wounds near West Palm Beach, Florida, one week after they got married.
