As they laid Reverend Marion Estep Senior to rest Monday at the family cemetery in the Perry County community of Chavies, police continued to investigate.

And hundreds of people would ask themselves and others why someone would want to kill the 76-year-old Penecostal minister, who had a wife and a home in Breathitt County.

Last Thursday afternoon, Estep left his son’s home in Chavies to head home to Jackson for dinner with his wife, Sandra, at their house in Shucky Bean Hollow, off the Quicksand Road.

Instead, Estep was found shot in his car by two hospital maintenance workers on a shoulder near Exit 56 of the Hal Rogers Parkway (formerly Daniel Boone Parkway) west of Hazard. The workers found the minister partially out of his late-model car, slumped and clinging to life. Shot three times in the chest and once in the head, Estep was immediately taken to the ARH Regional Medical Center in Hazard where he was rushed into surgery. Doctors and staff did all they could to save the minister’s life, but he died in the early hours of last Friday morning.

During the weekend past, tributes to the preacher poured in from friends and family throughout Eastern Kentucky and across the nation. Family members told of how Estep would often help people who were in dire need, and never asked any questions about what he did. And while his family asked him to stop picking up hitchhikers and giving them money, it was reported that Rev. Estep would just ignore their pleas.

On Sunday mornings at 10 a.m., Marion Estep, Sr. would preach at the Liberty Temple Pentecostal Church at Shucky Bean Hollow with his wife, Sandra Henson Estep, to whom he’d been married to for two years. Church members said that he was “the kind of man who would give the shirt off his back to keep you warm.” And at his Guestbook at the website Legacy.com, condolences of sympathy were sent by mourners, saying that “his love for people and salvation will truly be missed”, along with “he was a true servant of God…we have been in church with him many times and was always lifted up by his words.”

For 55 years, Estep was best known as a preacher at several churches in Perry County. Wearing suits and dark glasses - to conceal an eye that he had lost as a child - the minister was highly regarded as someone who “knew the Bible inside and out”, as well as a person who attended church five to six times a week on average, as was regularly seen at revivals in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana.

Rev. Estep’s funeral was held Monday morning at 11 a.m., at Maggard Brothers Mountain View Chapel in Hazard, with burial following afterward in the Estep Family Cemetery at Chavies. Police continue to investigate the slaying, and law enforcement officials ask anyone who saw Estep’s white Chrysler automobile on the parkway, or has any other information, to contact the Perry County Sheriff’s Office in Hazard at (606) 439-4523, or the Hazard Police Department at (606) 436-2222.