Catholic Family Vignettes

Twice in the same year?!! Tim Lyons will go to any length to show just “what Brown can do for you!”
(image source: James D. DeCamp/Dispatch)

We love you, Tim! Holy Family is a safer place thanks to guys like you:)

From the Columbus Dispatch:

Man chases down attackers at his church twice in one year
Saturday, June 14, 2008 3:14 AM
By Meredith Heagney
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Tim Lyons fights crime in his UPS uniform.

He doesn’t go around looking for bad guys. They just keep showing up at his parish, Holy Family Church in Franklinton.

Once they mess with his fellow churchgoers, the mild-mannered Lyons has no choice but to chase them down.

Thursday night, he led police to two women who had attacked Katie O’Keefe inside the front door of the church. O’Keefe was making sure no one got on the elevator during the storm that was knocking down trees and power lines. The church was struck by lightning.

The women started harassing her, then punching her in the face and pulling her down by her hair.

The attackers ran away, and Lyons, who came upon O’Keefe moments later, ran out in the downpour to find them. While splashing around the neighborhood, he saw them standing behind a nearby hotel and alerted police.

The women were detained briefly, but O’Keefe was told that she must file a complaint for a warrant to be issued for their arrest, said the Rev. Kevin Lutz, the parish priest.

It was almost exactly a year since Lyons’ last, more harrowing pursuit, chasing a purse-snatcher who “could’ve beat the snot out of him,” said Lutz.

Lyons tailed that guy out of the church parking lot, over the railroad tracks, through the woods and down an embankment before the thief jumped into the Scioto River. Lyons kept an eye on him until police fished him out near Confluence Park.

Both times, Lyons was coming straight from work to go to Mass and a parish council meeting.

Lutz says Lyons’ actions were heroic, but Lyons, 31, says any young, able-bodied person at the church would’ve done the same.

“It’s my church,” said Lyons, who lives in Orient. “I feel an obligation to, you know, stand up to crime in the neighborhood.”

Lutz said Lyons didn’t want to tell anybody, not even his wife, about what happened, but the priest is telling everybody who will listen.

He and O’Keefe have been through this before. About 16 years ago, he was counseling her and her husband-to-be at Christ the King Church when they were robbed at gunpoint and locked in a safe.

Back then, they didn’t have Lyons around.