It was with great sadness last August I learned of the death of an American priest, a Mill Hill missionary to east Africa. Father John Kaiser devoted 36 years of his life as a human rights worker and a catalyst for social ministry in the Kenyan countryside.

Father Kaiser was an open and unabashed advocate for social justice in a country that has faced new independence, hunger, growing pains of the development and now an HIV/AIDS epidemic.

He lived and worked in solidarity with the rural poor, in the green hills in the Lake Victoria basin or in the Rift Valley.

When ethnic unrest in the Rift Valley threatened to fragment the nation during the early 1990s, Father Kaiser openly spoke out against the government for its role in stoking the tensions.

Father Kaiser wrote strong criticisms of a government that perpetuated human rights abuses against some of its rural poor.

His documents to the United Nations and ongoing vocal criticism of the Kenyan government earned him the reverence of the people but the disgust of the government. Father Kaiser received threats on his life for his stand.

The night he died, Father Kaiser was en route to give sanctuary to another of his flock.

A young girl in his parish had been raped and impregnated by a government official, and he was on his way to get her out of a lodge where she was being forcibly held. Among his most dearly held roles as a pastor was to continually advocate for and work toward safety and respect for women.

Father Kaiser, driving alone through the Rift Valley, was shot to death at the side of the road, his body found near his truck and the murder weapon laying nearby.

An American priest joined the ranks of thousands who had answered a call to serve the poor and die in the act of living their faith.

The Catholic community in Kenya was shocked. Certainly Father Kaiser’s death is another in a litany of mysterious murders, car crashes and disappearances of government critics, but he was an outsider and a priest.

Thousands attended vigil services and mourned the loss of a great advocate for human rights in Africa and also a holy man. Pope John Paul II sent his condolences to Nairobi in a message to the Church in Kenya in the days after Father Kaiser’s death.

I have seen the flowers and makeshift memorials to Father Kaiser along the highway that slices through the floor of the Rift Valley. I have heard the references from the faithful in Kenya that Father Kaiser was a martyr, a saint.

The FBI investigation into Father Kaiser’s death, released several days after Easter, concluded that Father Kaiser’s death was probably a suicide.

Not only does no one within the Kenyan Church accept the findings, but they have begun to raise more questions regarding the way the investigation was conducted. Scathing editorials regarding the FBI investigators staying in a Nairobi hotel linked to government corruption raised questions about the objectivity of the investigation.

Purported witnesses and some of the in site evidence have disappeared, and the investigation did not begin until after many people had trampled through the scene and the body of the late Father Kaiser was removed.

The Catholic Church and the Kenyan people are unwilling to accept the FBI’s conclusion regarding the death of one of their heroes. Church leaders have been quick to criticize the FBI’s findings and continue to revere Father Kaiser as a great man who made the ultimate sacrifice for the people he loved.

The FBI was quick to point out Father Kaiser’s family history of manic depression and cited accounts that he had been “behaving erratically” on the night of his death. The Bureau used these points to substantiate its suicide conclusion, excusing the death as a by-product of bipolar disorder.

However, Father Kaiser had received yet another death threat that night and was bound from central Kenya to the west of the country to help the teenage girl held in the lodge.

Why anyone who had just received a death threat and was girding up for a confrontation with child rapists would not be tense and appear to be behaving differently than normal is beyond me. Of course he was frightened and nervous.

Father Kaiser gave 36 years in the tireless service of the marginalized and the impoverished, ministering in remote areas in a time marked with disease and civil unrest in parts of Kenya.

He did not leave his people for an American parish but continued to live his special call to the missions.

The recent FBI report does not diminish Father Kaiser’s impact on the world nor undermine his years of ministry.

The irony in his misunderstood life and death is that he will continue to be seen as a man who gave everything for his faith.

Rachel Faber is a senior in agronomy from Emmetsburg.