Beloved Kansas priest shot in broad daylight on church grounds, witnesses say
School was still in session Thursday before 3 p.m. Just behind the rectory, the fourth graders at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic School were outside playing during recess when they heard as many as four gunshots.
Students heard the blasts through the school windows.
On the ground, at the front of the rectory, the Rev. Raj “Arul” Balaswamy Carasala — the church’s priest for 14 years, a man originally from India who played dodgeball with the kids and high-fived them even after losing — lay bleeding.
Betty Haug was in her back yard, her husband Mike Haug said, when she peered across the way and saw the alleged shooter, Gary Lee Hermesch, 66, of Tulsa but formerly from Nemaha County, turn his weapon on the priest and fire.
By most accounts, he then traveled two blocks down what is normally one of Seneca’s sleepy streets to the Nemaha County Sheriff’s Office, where his brother works as a dispatcher, and turned himself in.
“Terrible thing. The world gets crazier and crazier,” said Mike Haug, who said that his wife remains shaken and probably would be for some time.
So it is for the 2,100 residents of this town, about an hour north of Topeka, which, on Friday, was left shocked, praying and in search for answers in the aftermath of what, until more is known, many can only see as the unprovoked and senseless killing of a popular priest and community friend.
“Devastated,” Jim Runnebaum, 74, said on the bleak and rainy morning, seated with his daughter, Lisa Kidd, 38, at Sweet Pea’s Bakery, on nearby Main Street. Runnebaum’s voice choked with emotion.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said. “He was probably one of my best friends. I can’t begin to tell you how good a person he is.”
Shooting death of Kansas priest
Nemaha County Sheriff Richard Vernon had no comment Friday other than to say, “For our little community, this has been a very, very trying time.”
All communications, he said, were to come out of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and the office of Brad Lippert, the Nemaha County attorney.
The KBI is not answering additional questions, including about a possible motive, in the killing. The agency doesn’t want to make any comments “that might impact a fair and successful prosecution,” said KBI spokesperson Melissa Underwood.
As of Friday, the Nemaha County attorney charged Hermesch with first-degree murder and he was being held on a $1 million bond. Hermesch made his first court appearance Friday afternoon.
Reaction in Seneca
Residents of Seneca were at a loss for a possible motive.
Hermesch, who was arrested Thursday following the shooting, is a known and common name in and around Seneca and surrounding towns, including in Goff and Kelly. A relative works at the Sheriff’s Department, another at the Nemaha Valley Community Hospital, where medics rushed Carasala moments after the shooting.
On Friday, bouquets of flowers lay at the doorway of the rectory. A bullet hole pierced a rectory window, cracks radiating from the hole. Word of the shooting spread quickly through town.
Runnebaum was at the emergency room within moments. Residents had already descended.
““We sat there and prayed for father,” Runnebaum said. “We sat there for about 10 minutes. The surgeon came out and I thought, this isn’t good. I’ll tell you what the surgeon told me. He said, well, he had a shot to his temple. He said after that happened, he never regained consciousness. He had a faint pulse when they brought him in. They worked on him, he said, for 22 minutes. But there was nothing more they could do.”
More than 500 people packed a 6 p.m. rosary Thursday and a 7:30 Mass at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, 411 Pioneer St.
More than 150 gathered Friday for an 8 a.m. Mass where the Rev. Jim Shaughnessy, a retired priest in the archdiocese, reflected on the words in Psalm 34: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
Gary Lee Hermesch
Hermesch is a resident of Tulsa. But residents said he grew up and attended high school in the area. He had been outspoken, known to have written angry letters published in the local newspaper, The Courier-Tribune.
“He’s kind of a loner,’ Rennebaum said. “I know the family really well. He’s had articles in the local paper, kind of off-the-wall. I don’t know why he came back here.”
In recent years, Hermesch wrote a series of letters to the editor, criticizing the Catholic church for becoming too modern and even referring to it as the “fake Catholic church.” He blamed some of the country’s problems on the Novus Ordo Mass, which replaced the Traditional Latin Mass as the standard form of the Mass in the 1960s.
In a letter published Jan. 20, 2021, Hermesch compared President Donald Trump to John F. Kennedy, who was Catholic.
“JFK was always ‘the man’, whether it be a debate, speech, press conference, or whatever, but not in the sense where he tried to ‘dominate and crush’ the way Trump does,” Hermesch wrote. “Why? Because even though he obviously had a lot of trouble living up to it, he at least lived in a time when he had a properly formed conscience (knowledge of the difference between right and wrong), and everybody knows knowledge is power.”
In a Feb. 16, 2022, letter, Hermesch ranted about Jews and said Vatican II destroyed the church.
“As for the Jews, unfortunately most of them (along with, I think, the fake, diabolical Vatican II church), rejected (and to this day still do) the Messiah (the only Way the Truth, and the Life),” he wrote. “In other words, by definition, anti-Christ, granted it being politically incorrect to say so.
“The Old Testament thus was completed and fulfilled in the New, with the Old no longer having any binding force and the Jews no longer being God’s chosen people, regardless of what Hitler and the Nazi’s or anybody else did to them. So, it would seem, its going to stay that way in these abomination of desolation times as long as the Church (and schools) are run by well paid, bought and paid for anti-Christ pimps.”
And Hermesch complained in a letter published March 20, 2024, about the writing on the backs of organizers’ T-shirts at a recent benefit in nearby Baileyville.
“It went something like ‘Live simply’, some other new world order/anti-Christ mush, and ‘Let God do the rest’, or something like that. In other words, embrace a false Jesus instead of the real one,” he wrote.
The problem with the “fake Catholic church,” Hermesch said, is “They don’t have any faith and don’t believe anything, really … If I was going to put something on a t-shirt it would be something like ‘Think like a conquistador — go forth and CONQUER’.”
Federal court records show that Hermesch filed for bankruptcy in Oklahoma three times over the years — in 1998, 2008 and 2021. According to the 2021 filing, his total assets including real estate and personal property were $182,549 and liabilities were $161,287. The document showed he owned a house in Tulsa valued at $145,000.
Hermesch was retired, the filing said, and his monthly income was $3,819 — $2,321 from a Boilermakers union pension and $1,498 from Social Security.
Hermesch’s LinkedIn page says he had been a Boilermaker at AZZ | WSI LLC, a company described as “a global leader of specialty welding and automated welding technologies and techniques across the industrial and energy markets.”
The Rev. Raj Balaswamy Carasala
Carasala, who took over at the church in 2011, was remembered as outgoing and spirited. Not long after arriving in Seneca, he led a $4 million renovation of the church. A fun-loving spirit, he cooked traditional Indian food for church gatherings and at golf outings would draw laughs and smiles when he drove the ball, running up and smacking it “cricket style.”
Kidd, 38, has two children in the Catholic school, one in middle school, another in elementary.
“That’s one of the hardest things,” Kidd said. “As a parent, you’re grieving, but then you see your kids completely heartbroken and asking why. And you can’t tell them.”
“I think right now, it’s kind of like, ‘Is this real? Is this a thing that actually happened?’” said Chase Jones, raised in town and a librarian at the Seneca Free Library. “It’s the kind of thing you think that happens in ‘other places.’”
Seneca, on Thursday, became that place.
The Star’s Robert A. Cronkleton contributed.
This story was originally published April 4, 2025 at 3:30 PM.
