Doloris Lowe McGrew was an African American woman who was 68 years old when she was killed on May 21, 2006, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during a morning service at the Ministry of Jesus Christ Church on Dallas Drive. According to contemporaneous reporting and later court records, the service was small that day, with only a handful of adults and several children present, and the mood inside the modest church setting shifted in an instant from familiar ritual to panic.
Investigators and prosecutors said the violence was driven by a domestic crisis that followed the couple into the pews. Anthony Bell, estranged from his wife Erica Bell, came to the church and pressed for reconciliation; when it was refused, he returned with a handgun and opened fire inside the sanctuary. Doloris McGrew was among the relatives caught in the line of fire, along with Leonard and Gloria Howard and Darlene Mills Selvage. The pastor, Claudia Brown, was shot in the back of the head but survived and was able to identify the shooter to a 911 operator as she regained consciousness, a detail that would become central in the early moments of the case.
The shooting inside the church did not end the rampage. Authorities said Bell forced Erica Bell to leave with him and their children, driving away as officers began converging on the scene. After stops that left two of the children safe with relatives, the remaining ride ended in an apartment-complex parking lot, where prosecutors said Bell shot Erica in the back of the head with the same gun used at the church, then staged the scene by placing the weapon in her hand and calling 911. Police arriving at the location arrested him there, still at the scene with the infant, closing the manhunt within hours of the first shots.
Arrests and charges followed quickly and heavily. A grand jury in East Baton Rouge Parish indicted Anthony Bell on June 15, 2006, for the first-degree murders of Erica Bell, Leonard Howard, Gloria Howard, Doloris McGrew, and Darlene Mills Selvage, and for the attempted first-degree murder of Claudia Brown. Prosecutors gave notice they would seek the death penalty, and the case moved forward as a capital prosecution built around survivor identification, the sequence of events, and Bell’s own statements to police, including a claim that tried to shift blame to his wife.
The case went to trial in 2008, ending with a jury finding Bell guilty on all counts. The court imposed five death sentences for the first-degree murder convictions and a 50-year hard-labor sentence for attempted first-degree murder, with later decisions upholding the convictions and sentences on direct review and rejecting post-conviction challenges. By the time the Louisiana Supreme Court revisited the matter in later proceedings, the core narrative remained unchanged in the record: a church shooting followed by an abduction and a final killing, with Doloris McGrew counted among the five people who did not make it home.
