A missionary-trainee who was shot to death last weekend helped a church group build a house on Montana’s Crow Indian Reservation last summer, and he impressed people there as big-hearted and enthusiastic.
Philip Crouse was killed at the Youth With a Mission training center in Arvada early Sunday. Police say former YWAM student Matthew Murray killed Crouse, 24, and Tiffany Johnson, 26.
Crouse helped a YWAM group build a 12-bedroom house in the reservation town of Lodge Grass, Mont., for Dana and Keith Bartlett and their eight foster children.
“He had a big heart and he did everything wholeheartedly,” Dana Bartlett said.
Crouse found a stray puppy in Lodge Grass and tried to find it a home there, Bartlett said. He ended up taking the dog with him back to Colorado to find it a home through an animal shelter.
Christian Chavez, 14, one of the Bartletts’ children, said Crouse gave him drum lessons.
“Whenever we were on a break from working on the house, he’d teach me something new,” Christian said.
Two sisters who were killed when Murray opened fire later that day at New Life Church in Colorado Springs had also spent time in Montana.
Stephanie Works, 18, and Rachael Works, 16, lived in Montana in the 1990s, said the Rev. Daniel Davis of the First Presbyterian Church in Whitefish. The sisters and their family were members of that church from August through December 1995, he said.
