ANNA, Ill. (ABP) — Two women severely beaten in an attack at a small-town Baptist church continue to recover from their injuries while neighbors rally to support them.
Residents of Anna, Ill., a town of about 5,000 people in the southern part of the state, raised more than $11,400 in four hours at a recent fund-raiser at the local McDonald's restaurant. The funds will help the families of Mary Shepard and Leona Mount, who were attacked and robbed Sept. 28 while working at First Baptist Church in Anna, with medical and travel expenses.
Mount, 76, a church-maintenance worker, was transferred Oct. 20 from intensive care to a regular room at St. Louis University Hospital after surgery for several facial fractures. Shepard, 69, the church treasurer, is recovering at home and anxious to return to work. According to an update on the church website, she has requested church software to install on her home computer so she can do her work from there.
Short Enterprises, owned by Dean and Gail Short of Anna, offered to donate 100 percent of food sales at the McDonald's from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Oct. 20 to the victims' families' fund. Hundreds of residents showed up, spending $7,700 on food and leaving additional cash donations totaling nearly $3,700.
Customers filled the restaurant's lobby from beginning to end and cars lining up for the drive-through lane stretched out of the parking lot and onto the street.
"It is an absolute miracle to pull $11,000 out of a community this small in four hours," Nikki Hadley, community-relations representative for Short Enterprises, told WSIL-TV, an ABC affiliate in Harrisburg, Ill.
The brutal crime that shocked the normally quiet community has moved residents of Anna to try to help in numerous ways.
Second graders at Lincoln Elementary School made get-well cards for the women as an art project. "They're going to see that we care for them, that we care for them a lot," said student Kaylee Oxford.
"We felt like this was a great opportunity to teach students about compassion, about caring for others, about how to respond to mean people," said Principal Mark Laster.
Willis Bates, 45, is charged with attempted murder in the attack, which allegedly took place after he broke into the church where the women were working. The church's pastor, Tony Foeller, was also working in his office, but he said he did not hear anything because the noise was drowned out by the sound of an air-conditioning unit mounted in his office window.
Bates' neighbor, 23-year-old Jared Garver, is charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly hiding the suspect in his basement while police were looking for him for questioning as a person of interest in the crime.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
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