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Pastor Carl Sanders only intended to pull out his wallet when he walked into the Evansville Dollar General Store on Friday night, but he ended up pulling out his gun when he happened upon a robbery in process.
25-year-old Jermaine Dewayne Marshall yelled at Sanders to get on the floor, threatening him with what appeared to be a gun wrapped in plastic after hitting the clerk behind the register in the face multiple times.
"He was telling me to get on the ground," Sanders told WFIE Evansville. "That's when I pulled my weapon and said, 'No, you get on the ground.'"
Sanders has a permit to carry a firearm, and he held the suspect at the store until the police arrived. The Evansville Police explained to NBC that Marshall walked into the store with a bandanna over his face and an "unknown object wrapped in plastic in his hand" and proceeded to order the person at the register to open it and give him the money. He "struck him several times in the face" before Sanders walked in and "divinely intervened," as some have joked.
"I told him, 'Don't move, put your face down on the ground, don't even look at me right now,'" Sanders recalled. "And I just told him, 'This is out of love.'"
Though he's being hailed as a hero, Sanders, the Senior Pastor at Covenant Ministry, insisted that he was simply in the right place at the right time.
"He didn't deserve to be hurt," said Sanders. "I wanted him to know you can't do this."
The object that Marshall was attempting to pass off as a gun was, in fact, a spoon. No one was harmed during the incident.
Sandors tweeted shortly afterwards:
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