Pastor’s widow claims church evicted her from her home - 247 news
The widow of a beloved Brooklyn pastor says she’s being coldly kicked out of the parsonage just two months after his death - but the church board claims it’s on her husband’s orders. On Aug. 17, Paula Brown returned to the sprawling two-story Colonial in Ditmas Park after running errands to find a 10-day eviction notice stuffed behind the screen door. “I broke down crying,” Brown, 55, told The Post. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was completely traumatized.” Her husband, the Rev. Roy E. Brown, who founded Pilgrim Baptist Church in Bushwick in 1966 and became known as the “archbishop” of a network of 40 affiliated congregations across the country, died June 2 at the age of 75. Yet bitter family rivalries that reared up during the minister’s last months - and even the night of his death - provided a clue that the widow’s bereavement period would not be a peaceful one. As the pastor - who suffered from prostate cancer, diabetes and who had lost both legs - grew sicker, rumors swirled that he was being mistreated by his wife. Some of the gossip was churned up by the minister’s own daughter, Tiwana Brown. “There was a lot of abuse going on in the home,” she said on a KZitem talk show. But former congregant Antonio Quinones said Tiwana was “poisoning” the bishop with “lies” about his wife not “taking care of him and letting him sit in his own sh-t. “People believed it.” Tiwana called adult protective services on her stepmother, Paula Brown, who in turn tried to obtain an order of protection against Tiwana. An APS spokeswoman would not comment, citing confidentiality rules. Tiwana Brown did not return calls seeking comment. The years-long conflict reached a boiling point hours after the bishop’s death, when Tiwana demanded her father’s jewelry, but Brown refused, said a source familiar with the incident. “She was yelling, ‘You killed my father! I want an autopsy!’” said Brown, who called the police. “He’s not even dead an hour and she’s screaming at me over his dead body.” Now, the preacher’s wife is fighting the chruch board. She said the eviction order “blindsided” her. “The church never had any conversation with me about this,” she said. “He always said, ‘Paula, you’re going to be taken care of. You don’t have to worry.” She believes the board has a buyer waiting in the wings to purchase the stately, $2.5 million, century-old home on Ditmas Avenue. Rev. Brown took out a $200,000 mortgage to buy the five-bedroom home in 1992 and sold it to the church three years later for $10. The church board is unapologetic about bouncing Mrs. Brown, and claims it’s simply executing her husband’s verbal orders to boot her within 90 days of his death. “Our action is … in compliance with her husband’s wish,” church lawyer Monte Chandler told The Post. The attorney refused to provide paperwork to back the claim. Chandler believes the church was “particularly magnanimous” to the widow and her husband since he retired 13 y
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