News Argus

by Mark Silva

Who kills an abortion provider?

Police in Wichita, Kan., say Scott P. Roeder did.

They have arrested the 51-year-old from Merriam, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, in the Sunday church-hall slaying of Dr. George Tiller of Wichita.

In the rear window of the 1993 Ford Taurus that Roeder was driving: a red rose, a symbol favored by abortion opponents. On the rear of the car: a Christian fish bearing the name of Jesus.

The Kansas City Star's Judy L. Thomas offers a picture of the alleged assailant of the 67-year-old physician who was one of the few in the nation willing to perform late-term abortions, who had been shot before and whose clinic had been bombed. Kansas City, Roeder allegedly wrote, is "the nation's abortion capital'' -- and it was time that "some attention'' be brought to Tiller's work, a Scott Roeder allegedly posted on the Internet.

Those who know Roeder say he viewed the killng of abortion doctors as an act of justifiable homicide, the Star reports:

"I know that he believed in justifiable homicide," said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist who made headlines in 1995 when she was ordered by a federal judge to stop using a bullhorn within 500 feet of any abortion clinic. "I know he very strongly believed that abortion was murder and that you ought to defend the little ones, both born and unborn."

See the profile of the alleged murderer from Merriam, Kan., in the Star.