ARKANSAS
Associated Baptist Press
By Bob Allen
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
TEXARKANA, Ark. (ABP) – A Southern Baptist pastor was sentenced to five years in prison Feb. 28 after a jury in Texarkana, Ark., found him guilty of sexual assaulting a 3-year-old girl inside his church last April.
South Texarkana Baptist Church pastor Travis Payne, 67, was arrested in June and charged with second-degree sexual assault after a woman visiting the church told police that she caught him in the act of inappropriately touching the child a few minutes before the start of a church revival service on April 25.
“I was in shock. How could he do that in God’s house?” star witness Miriam Spiros said, according to trial coverage by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Spiros was visiting the church because her husband, Philip, music minister at Macedonia First Baptist Church in Fouke, Ark., was invited as a guest to sing at South Texarkana’s revival. She said she left the sanctuary a few minutes before the service for a quick trip to the restroom and happened to witness the crime.
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