The 17 masked men pulled two teenage boys off the Rev. David Beaumont’s truck in northern Mexico, forced them to the ground, and put guns against their heads as their mother screamed to the priest that her sons were about to be killed.
Beaumont, who was born in Hempstead and grew up in Commack, has spent the last 20 years as a Franciscan missionary in one of the most dangerous and violent areas of the world. On this day last April, he had to make a split-second decision.
“I was saying to myself, ‘Well, now either I’m really going to be a missionary and be prepared to give my life for the people, or run and hide,’ ” Beaumont recalled in a telephone interview. “I felt it was a pivotal moment in my life. When I walked out to them [the masked men], I realized that the last thing I might see would be the bullets coming at me.”
The men did not fire at the American priest in his tattered brown friar’s habit, and he was able to get the boys back in the truck and leave with their mother. But for the next several days they were all so shaken they lost their appetites and could not eat.
Read it all.
(Newsday) Amid Mexican violence, A Long Island Born Catholic priest thrives
The 17 masked men pulled two teenage boys off the Rev. David Beaumont’s truck in northern Mexico, forced them to the ground, and put guns against their heads as their mother screamed to the priest that her sons were about to be killed.
Beaumont, who was born in Hempstead and grew up in Commack, has spent the last 20 years as a Franciscan missionary in one of the most dangerous and violent areas of the world. On this day last April, he had to make a split-second decision.
“I was saying to myself, ‘Well, now either I’m really going to be a missionary and be prepared to give my life for the people, or run and hide,’ ” Beaumont recalled in a telephone interview. “I felt it was a pivotal moment in my life. When I walked out to them [the masked men], I realized that the last thing I might see would be the bullets coming at me.”
The men did not fire at the American priest in his tattered brown friar’s habit, and he was able to get the boys back in the truck and leave with their mother. But for the next several days they were all so shaken they lost their appetites and could not eat.
Read it all.