This article concerns the killing of a young child and refers to drug use and a mental-health crisis. The account below is kept sober and free of graphic detail.
On the fourth of March, 1990, the Orange County Register reported the death of a three-year-old girl, Marcelene Boydston, killed in a Fullerton apartment by a twenty-one-year-old man who attended a local church called Jacob’s Well. The man, Michael Pacewitz, called the police from a phone booth, confessed, and led officers to her body, with a kitchen knife still in his pocket. He had relapsed onto methamphetamine three weeks earlier, after losing his job, and in the days before the killing his conduct had turned erratic enough that his own congregation noticed. This is a documented case, and it asks for two disciplines at once: honesty about what the church had to do with it, and honesty about what it did not.
Begin with what this is not. Jacob’s Well Christian Center had once belonged to the Potter’s House network. But in January 1990, two months before the killing, it had cut those ties, telling the paper the Arizona group was “too hard-line.” So this is not a Potter’s House crime, and nothing here lays a child’s death at the network’s door. A man in methamphetamine psychosis killed a child, and the responsibility for that is his alone. The narrow thing worth examining is the lens his church reached for while he was visibly coming apart.
What Jacob’s Well in Fullerton called it
In the days before the killing, Pacewitz was not hiding his condition. He had told friends and members that he was back on crystal methamphetamine. On the Thursday night, at a week-long revival, he walked to the front of the hall during the worship and dropped his pants in front of the congregation. An assistant pastor escorted him out while a visiting evangelist told the room to keep praising the Lord. Outside, Pacewitz apologized and said again that he had been using for three weeks. None of this was hidden. What is striking is the frame the church placed around it. A member who had lived with him described the collapse to the paper not as a relapse that needed medical help but as warfare. He called it “a satanic force” set on harming a man who was trying to serve God. The pastor cast the same deterioration as a contest between drugs and salvation.
The frame that could not see a child in danger
That frame carries a cost, and the cost is the entire point. When a man’s visible disintegration is read as a spiritual attack on a servant of God, the plain safeguarding facts recede. The facts were these. A man openly using methamphetamine, unstable enough to expose himself to a congregation two days earlier, was handed a three-year-old to watch overnight. The childcare passed informally from one church member to the next, the way it routinely did in that circle, until it reached him. A church that had named his condition a spiritual battle did not, in the same breath, name it a reason to keep him away from a child.
Where the Potter’s House inheritance showed
Here the lapsed affiliation matters, not as guilt but as genealogy. Jacob’s Well had split from Potter’s House only weeks earlier, yet it still kept the network’s rhythms: twice-daily services, speaking in tongues, and the reflex to read every crisis as the devil at work. In the same months, the same Orange County paper was documenting the Potter’s House proper. There a pastor preached that the devil made it rain, and a boy was taught to see a demon in his own mother. The habit of spiritualizing everything is portable. A congregation can renounce a network’s authority and keep its way of reading the world, and that reading is the part which, turned on a drug-induced psychosis, mistook a medical emergency for a testimony in progress.
The test the epistle actually names
Scripture does not license this substitution. The doctrine of spiritual conflict is real, and Paul writes that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12). But Paul never offers it in place of sober judgment, and the same Bible sets a plain test for whether a religion is doing its work. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this,” James writes, “To visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction” (James 1:27). The measure of real faith, in James’s hands, is the protection of the vulnerable. The most vulnerable person in this story was a three-year-old in the care of people who saw a spiritual battle where there stood a child in danger. A church can speak in tongues twice a day and still fail the one test the epistle names.
What the record leaves us
None of this convicts Jacob’s Well of the crime, and none of it is meant to. Pacewitz killed Marcelene Boydston, and the law had its own work to do with him. What the record preserves is a smaller and more transferable warning. When a community is trained to read collapse as warfare, it can watch a man announce that he is in crisis and still hand him a child, because the frame it trusts is hunting for a devil rather than a danger. That habit did not begin at Jacob’s Well, and it did not end when Jacob’s Well left the network that teaches it. Read the contemporary report, and set it beside the other documented cases. Then weigh for yourself how much of what failed that night was chemical, and how much was a way of seeing that no longer knew how to call an emergency by its name.
