Merrill had worked in MS for more than 30 years, according to the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky.
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Durant police and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are investigating the deaths.
“She was planning a trip here next month and we were talking about what we were going to do”, Rosemarie Merrill, 74, said.
Patricia Wyatt-Weatherly, a next-door neighbor to the nuns, said she was at a doctor’s appointment in the MS capital of Jackson when she got word of the killings.
Maureen Smith, a spokeswoman for the Catholic Diocese of Jackson, said there were signs of a break-in at the home and the nuns’ vehicle was missing. “She felt a connection and a need to serve people”, the profile stated. The other is part of the School Sisters of St. Francis in Milwaukee.
Merrill moved to MS in 1981 and believed her calling was to stay in the Deep South, according to a 2010 article in The Journey, a publication of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.
Paula Merrill was born in 1947 in Stoneham, where she was baptized at St. Patrick’s Parish. “They’ll give you the shirt off their back”, she said.
Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesman Warren Strain says it appears the nuns were homicide victims. She first entered the Kentucky-based order in 1968, but returned to MA to follow her dreams of studying medicine. “We simply do what we can wherever God places us”, she said.
The Clarion Ledger of Jackson reported that Dr. Elias Abboud, the clinic owner, said the sisters raised money to help care for the poor.
In Mississippi, she continued to study medicine and became a registered nurse. “Paula was a bit more shy, yet in the clinic I was always impressed by her professional demeanor”, Plata said. “They would just keep their nose to the grindstone, doing what had to be done”, he said.
“Lynn and I grieve the loss of Sisters Paula Merrill and Margaret Held, who were found violently killed in their home in Durant, Mississippi, this morning”. We had a wonderful time with her and that is very fresh in my mind.
The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth are an global Congregation in a multicultural world. “Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays”, Rosemarie Merrill said. She last spoke to her Tuesday.
“They would treat them for free”, he said. Her burial will be in Kentucky.
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In a statement from their U.S. Province Leadership Team, the Milwaukee order says Sister Margaret Held had been a member of the School Sisters of St. Francis for 49 years “and lived her ministry caring for and healing the poor”. “I can only pray for the perpetrator or perpetrators”.
