Merrill was a member of Sisters of Charity.
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According to publications of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Merrill moved to MS from MA in 1981 and believed her calling was to stay in the Deep South. Merrill and Held rotated one week at a time at the Lexington Medical Clinic and the Durant Primary Care Clinic.
He said they were part of a small Catholic community in the state that helps the poor.
Diane Curtis, a spokeswoman for the Sisters of Charity, said it wasn’t known how much time Merrill had spent in Kentucky.
Dr. Elias Abboud worked with the sisters for years and agreed to help build the Lexington clinic because “you could feel their passion about serving the people, helping the poor”.
Chief Lee says both nuns are nurse practitioners.
Abboud said he later began working for a hospital in Jackson, which left the two nuns to provide nearly all the medical care at the clinic, adding they were always ready to go the “extra mile”.
Durant police found the two nuns with stab wounds in a home where the two lived together during a welfare check on Thursday. “They had a deep love of scripture”, he said.
“I can’t imagine anybody they had a problem with”, Abboud said.
“I have an very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach”, Durant assistant police chief James Lee said. They were the real McCoy.
She said the sisters worked at the Lexington Medical Clinic, about 10 miles away from their home in Durant, which is in one of the poorest counties in the state.
Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesman Warren Strain says it appears the nuns were murdered.
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Lee said police did not yet have a motive and did not give details about how the nuns died. It also reported that the nuns distributed books, school supplies and other items to the needy, according to church officials.
