Wednesday, February 17, 1999
Minister confident heaven awaits Berry
BY MICHAEL HAWTHORNE
Enquirer Columbus Bureau
COLUMBUS — For the Rev. David Chase, it doesn't matter if Wilford Lee Berry Jr. fails to express remorse for murdering another man.
The Rev. Mr. Chase, who has met monthly with the convicted killer since September, thinks Mr. Berry is “born again” and will go to heaven.
The Columbus minister said Mr. Berry has not changed his mind about dropping his court appeals and is ready to die.
“My only concern was getting him right with God,” the Rev. Mr. Chase said Tuesday. “I believe he has undergone a change in his heart and has become a child of God. Everything else is in the past.”
The preacher and prisoner met last fall after the Rev. Mr. Chase was contacted by a chaplain at the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus, where Mr. Berry has been held since he was beaten by fellow death row inmates during a September 1997 riot.
Although the Rev. Mr. Chase normally doesn't counsel prisoners, Mr. Berry had asked to speak with a minister affiliated with the nondenominational Word of Faith church.
The minister didn't know the prisoner he was meeting with could be the first person executed in Ohio since 1963. Or that he had been dubbed “The Volunteer” by prosecutors because he would rather die than spend life in prison.
Until recently, the Rev. Mr. Chase didn't even know the details of the crime for which Mr. Berry was sentenced to death: shooting his boss, Cleveland baker Charles Mitroff, in the back of the head during a 1989 robbery.
“He never brought it up, and I never asked,” the minister said. “I wasn't there for that. I was there to pray with him and lead him to the Lord.”
At the prison hospital, the minister sat in a hallway and talked with Mr. Berry through a slot in the cell door used to pass food trays back and forth.
They read the Bible and discussed books by Kenneth E. Hagin, a Tulsa, Okla., Word of Faith minister. Sometimes they talked about the weather.
As they wrapped up their meeting last week, the Rev. Mr. Chase gave Mr. Berry a small book of the Rev. Mr. Hagin's writings and asked if he should return today. The minister also offered to accompany Mr. Berry to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lu casville, where the execution will take place.
Mr. Berry declined both offers.
While Pope John Paul II and other religious leaders are urging Gov. Bob Taft to commute Mr. Berry's sentence to life in prison, the Rev. Mr. Chase cited Bible verses he contends support society's ultimate punishment.
There is Romans 13:4: But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid ... for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
“When he says he is ready to die, I can pray in agreement,” the Rev. Mr. Chase said. “Living in a cell like that is not much of a life. I think he will be better off in the next one.”
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