Church elder Frank McNair, 70, had been married for 40 years to his estranged wife Anne. People thought Anne was a good Christian lady. However, she shocked her family and friends on Saturday morning when she gunned down her husband and then tried to take her own life.
McNair, a well-respected church elder of St. Noah Church of God in Christ in Aiken, South Carolina, died of a single gunshot wound in the thoracic area of his back. Anne, who lived next door to McNair, is still recovering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to WJBF.
Bamberg County Sheriff Ed Darnell told The Times and Democrat that the incident was an "apparent murder and attempted suicide."
Nobody from McNair's close circle of family and friends expected what happened to the couple. The two were both well-liked by their community, and nobody saw them quarelling.
"I'm feeling upset about it, they [were both] good [people] to me. In fact, I was in their wedding when they first got married," Jeffrey Bynes, Anne's cousin, told WRDW. "For this tragedy to happen like it is... I don't really have an idea what's the cause of that."
Bynes said Anne was known to be "quiet, easy-going... very open," and "very church."
"That's why, you know, I'm just surprised to hear of this situation," he said.
Bynes acknowledged that the couple had been dealing with personal issues, but he does not know what these were. Whatever those might be, Bynes knows for certain that it was complicated since they resorted to living in separate houses.
"Sometimes she was living down in Georgia, and sometimes she was staying up here, you know, staying with her mother," he said. It's been going on quite a while."
Meanwhile, gospel singer Yolanda Hammonds remembered her father McNair as a principled "man of God." She says, "He was a great man. He was a man of stature and a man of God. He cared about our youth and he lived what he preached."
