A man convicted in June of the 2023 killing Eunice Dwumfour, a pastor’s wife and Republican New Jersey councilwoman, was sentenced to life in prison on Monday.
New Jersey Superior Court Judge Joseph Paone imposed the maximum sentence on 31-year-old murder convict Rashid Ali Bynum at the end of an emotional hearing in the courtroom in New Brunswick, according to NJ.com. Bynum also received an additional 10-year sentence expected to run concurrently with the life sentence for two weapons charges.
Dwumfour was gunned down in her car just outside her townhome in Sayreville on Feb. 1, 2023, by Bynum. Her then 11-year-old daughter, who heard the shots that killed her, told the court that she still hasn’t recovered from the traumatic event.
“I still have not recovered,” she wrote in a statement read to Bynum by Assistant Prosecutor Kristen Pridgen. “Why did you kill my mom? I am struggling to know why?”
Despite the conviction, authorities never gave a public a motive for Dwumfour’s killing by a man her widow says she was trying to lead to Christ.
“Eunice tried to bring him into the church, was trying to lead him to Christ. I don’t see that’s a bad thing for somebody to be led to Christ,” Dwumfour’s widow, Eze King, told the judge.
At the time of her murder, Dwumfour, a 30-year-old mother, had recently married King who was serving as a pastor in Nigeria. Along with her work as a councilwoman, Dwumfour also served as a pastor at the Joshua Iginla Lasisi-led Champions Royal Assembly megachurch headquartered in Nigeria.
Investigators said she was also an officer of Fire Congress Fellowship, a related entity of the church that has a branch in Virginia, WFMZ reported. Bynum was listed in Dwumfour’s cellphone contacts under an acronym for Fire Congress Fellowship.
According to NJ.com, Dwumfour and Bynum had been roommates “when she recruited him for her Bible study group in New Jersey.” Prosecutors say Dwumfour asked him to leave after he refused to follow the “house rules.”
Bynum’s defense attorney Michael Ashley reportedly asked the judge to consider that Bynum was mentally incompetent at the time he killed Dwumfour, but the prosecution countered that argument by showing how he calculated her murder.
Deputy First Assistant Prosecutor Tzvi Dolinger explained that Bynum started plotting the murder of the pastor’s wife five days before the act. He then drove from his home in Virginia to wait for her to return to her home in the dark.
“He was in the dark all alone, waiting for the perfect moment,” Dolinger said.
“Your mother should be disgraced that she brought you into this world,” Eunice’s sister, Priscilla Dwumfour, told Bynum at the sentencing hearing. “She needs to take you out of it.”
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