On the evening of October 17, 2021, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Taneka Gardner pulled a suitcase through the gates of a church in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She had been introduced to Pathways International Kingdom Restoration Ministries years earlier by her aunt, and Gardner had been attending often—captivated by the sermons of the church’s charismatic founder and pastor, Kevin Smith.
Smith was a self-proclaimed prophet, sharing a preaching style with popular American megachurch and Baptist leaders. He was adored for his gregarious energy. But Smith’s behaviour that day was unrecognizable. For months, he had become obsessed with online conspiracy theories, his social media full of disinformation about the “plandemic,” the impending collapse of the global economy, and health problems associated with 5G networks. He had become paranoid about how other countries, including Canada, where he had grown up and trained as a pastor, were responding to COVID-19.
Hours before Gardner arrived, Smith, also thirty-nine, had posted on Facebook, commanding people to dress in white, leave their cellphones at home, and rush to the church. “THE ARK is Loading now!” he wrote, using the nickname of his church. “The Flood is coming. Go Now RUN,” he wrote again. Dozens of loyal parishioners, including children, took heed of Smith’s call and hurried toward the church compound on Albion Road, a suburban area of the city, in the parish of St. James.
As congregants entered the church, Smith wrote the names of each person in a book. When Gardner walked through the doors, Smith turned to her. “Is your blood clean?” he asked. “Do you believe that I am the resurrection and the life?” Gardner replied yes. Smith then said that her blood had to be cleansed in order for her to be resurrected. “I will have to cut your throat,” he told her. She allegedly again replied, “Yes.”
Smith then handed a knife to a seventeen-year-old follower named Billy, whom he instructed to cut Gardner’s throat. But Billy hesitated, later saying that he remembered that one of the Ten Commandments states “thou shalt not kill.” Smith’s right-hand man, Andre Ruddock, stepped forward and, at Smith’s urging, allegedly cut Gardner’s throat. She died shortly thereafter.
Before the sun rose the next morning, three parishioners would be dead—a tragedy with echoes of Waco and Jonestown. That night turned into one of the Caribbean’s most notorious criminal cases: a cult pastor whose embrace of pandemic conspiracy theories ended in a bizarre and horrendous act of human sacrifice.
Kevin Smith was born in 1982 and raised in Glengoffe, Jamaica, an agricultural town north of the capital, Kingston. He turned to religion as a young child and was baptized at age nine. Rhone Charlton, one of Smith’s childhood friends and classmates, remembers Smith as competitive, studious, and eloquent. “Let’s say we were given a line to read in class; you best believe that he was going to give it 100 percent,” Charlton recalls.
Court records suggest that Smith was sexually abused by a male relative when he was a child, and physically abused by his father, who has since passed away. When he was twelve, Smith immigrated to Canada with his family, settling in the Greater Toronto Area. For many Jamaicans, migration overseas was the ultimate dream, for educational and vocational opportunities not available or attainable on the island. Shortly after arriving in Canada, Smith claimed, he received a divine calling to preach. At eighteen, he became ordained as a minister by a Pentecostal denomination that doesn’t require a seminary degree to become a minister. Instead, he once said, qualification came from the “call of God on your life.”
From there, Smith joined Exodus Deliverance Temple, an evangelical church in Mississauga, Ontario, founded in 1999. He also launched his own ministry, called KOS Deliverance International (the initials stand for his full name: Kevin Ontoniel Smith). Smith eventually travelled throughout Africa, Asia, and South America, spreading his word during what he called “Awakenings,” which included lively sermons and music. “This young man of God has been blessed with a prophetic ministry that represents a ‘Church without Borders,’” KOS’s now-deleted website stated. “He is determined to settle for nothing less than excellence in ministry.”
As the years went by, Smith claimed to have attended Tyndale University, an esteemed private evangelical Christian university in Toronto, where he studied humanities and theology. He also claimed to have earned a doctor of ministry degree from Mount Olivet Bible Institute and Seminary, also in Toronto. While he has referred to himself as a registered clinical counsellor and “sought-after holistic psychotherapist,” he has never been registered with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario. He also claimed to have obtained a doctorate in divinity from Vision International University, a private distance-learning Christian seminary based in Ramona, California, and to be a sitting member of the International Council of Pentecostal Bishops of Canada.
On April 28, 2007, Smith married a woman in Canada, though they quickly became estranged. Smith’s ex-wife described him as verbally abusive and someone who lied about his private life. “He is not living an honest life,” she would later recall, according to court records.
After spending years growing his ministry and theological credentials from Toronto through his twenties, Smith began spending more time going back and forth from Jamaica. Eventually he put down roots and attracted parishioners through a more formalized ministry in downtown Montego Bay, a popular tourist destination renowned for its pristine beaches and resorts.
By 2012, when he was thirty, Smith had become beloved by his followers. One former attendee, Shereece, happened to pass by the church one day and heard Smith’s voice. “That voice sounds powerful,” she remembers thinking. She went inside. Shereece immediately felt that Smith wasn’t a typical pastor. He insisted on being referred to as His Excellency. He spoke eagerly about the gospel of prosperity, a fast-growing conservative ideology that holds that believers can transcend hardship and poverty through devotion and tithing—donations—to the church. The modern “health and wealth” gospel, as it’s also known, originated with Pentecostalist leaders in the United States and has spread to Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The ideology has been criticized as predatory and manipulative, especially when pastors operating in disenfranchised communities emphasize heavy tithing.
Shereece and former members say Smith regularly brought up the fact that he was a Canadian citizen, a point of privilege he leveraged to suggest that he could help others get visas to work or study in Canada—for a fee. Smith charged for consultations or prayers, attendance at workshops, and other events. One event in 2013, a “wealth transformation summit” entitled “Money Come to Me Now!” promised “explosive prophecies” to help participants “break the cycle of poverty forever.” Shereece eventually stopped attending the church. “I didn’t see my life was improving,” she says. “What he was doing there wasn’t scriptural and based upon what the Bible says, [which is to] freely give and freely receive.”
Christianity was brought to Jamaica in the sixteenth century by Spanish colonizers. The British followed in the mid-seventeenth century, establishing the first Anglican church. Today, there are hundreds of churches across Jamaica; approximately 67 percent of the population identify with various Christian denominations, predominantly Protestantism.
For many Jamaicans, church serves as more than a place for community, recreation, and worship. In a country where social infrastructure is fractured and mistrust of government and law enforcement is high, the church is a forum for everything from spiritual guidance to financial assistance and even justice. Some people experiencing violence and crime will turn to the church before they turn to the police or the courts. Mary Wildish, a pastor in Montego Bay who leads Trumpet Call Ministries International, deals with this often. “Our society here does not have an expedient response to domestic violence. If you’re in the United States of America and you have a situation where a woman is experiencing abuse from her husband, you call 9-1-1, the police are going to be there,” Wildish says. “[Here] many times the call doesn’t go to the police; it comes to the pastor.”
Smith appeared to embrace this role and power. The prosecution’s report describes how if church members wanted to do something like go on vacation, they would have to get Smith’s permission to do so. Without his blessing, Smith would tell them, members and their families would not be able to clear immigration. He also began surrounding himself with a cohort of young men from the church who served as security guards and assistants. Some of them would hold an umbrella over Smith’s head in public to protect his skin from the sun.
Around 2007, Smith and Charlton, his childhood friend, reconnected after they’d lost touch when Smith moved to Canada. They’d stayed in touch sporadically over the years, keeping each other updated on their parallel paths in ministry. Charlton was an emerging pastor in Montego Bay as well, and he was happy to know about Smith’s growing résumé and international experiences. Smith told him he was ministering to high-ranking government officials in Jamaica, including Portia Simpson Miller, the prime minister at the time. “And then he would just say ‘other government officials’ and just leave it at that,” Charlton recalls.
Smith invited Charlton to come minister at his church from time to time. But Charlton declined. Eventually, rumours surfaced about the misappropriation of church funds and what Wildish calls a “very controlling spiritual idolatry.” Both Charlton and Wildish felt uneasy about Smith’s rise and obsession with power and control. “It was almost as if he was walking with powers that were not of God,” Wildish recalls. Though Wildish sensed something greater was amiss, neither she nor Smith’s congregants were aware of the man’s troubling past that went more than ten years back and was more than 1,700 miles away, in Toronto.
On August 22, 2006, after returning home to Richmond Hill, north of Toronto, from a trip in England, Smith was jet lagged and lonely, craving to spend time with someone besides his brother. “I wanted, you know, emotional company,” Smith would later recall, as per court documents. So he perused online ads for escorts and reached out to a man for his services. Matt, whose real name is under a court-ordered publication ban, arrived at Smith’s home around 10:30 one evening. “I would need him [Matt] to be as inconspicuous as possible because I live straight and I’m a Christian,” Smith would recall, “. . . there was a conflict happening inside of me in essence to what I was going to do or not do.”
By morning, Matt had gone to the police. Smith was arrested at his house and charged with sexual assault. Smith says the officers brought up Jamaica in their questioning and used it against him, “saying that because I’m from Jamaica, and it’s taboo in Jamaica to be gay,” Smith would recall. He told the police that “gays are just people who need redirection.”
The following year, Smith stood trial in Newmarket, Ontario, and pleaded not guilty. Smith’s lawyer argued that the non-consensual act didn’t happen. When Smith took the stand, he was asked about his professional background, and he described himself as an “international minister of religion” from the Pentecostal denomination who had travelled to 300 cities to minister. “We do crusades all around the world in churches and open fields and stadiums and things to that magnitude to preach the gospel,” Smith explained. In cross examination, he admitted that when he spoke with the police, he told them that Matt had tried to extort money from him during a religious counselling session; he did not mention the sexual nature of the visit or the altercation that ensued. “I was very ashamed for what had happened,” Smith said.
The prosecutor, in her closing argument, shredded Smith’s testimony. “His life or his platform . . . is a facade,” she said. “Mr. Smith’s reputation and his public persona are his primary concern . . . [and he] will go to any extent to preserve that facade.” In the end, the judge found Smith guilty of sexual assault, sentencing him to six months in jail followed by two years of probation. “Mr. Smith, it seems to me,” the judge said, “to quote a parable, might be viewed as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Smith would go on to breach his probation for failure to attend counselling but avoid arrest for six years by remaining in Jamaica. In 2017, he finally turned himself in to Toronto Police Service. He pleaded guilty but was allowed to return to Jamaica on the condition that if he returned to Canada in the following eighteen months, he would have to report for probation, make a charitable donation of $500 to a rape crisis centre, and complete sexual behaviour counselling if he stayed for more than a month.
“Does he have an ongoing [sexual behavioural] problem?” the judge asked Smith’s lawyer during the sentencing—to which his lawyer replied, “He advises me he does not.”
Several months later, in April 2018, Smith’s followers marched down the streets of Montego Bay in celebration of his thirty-sixth birthday. With a police escort and a marching band leading the way, he rode behind in a silver stretch limousine. If anyone in town didn’t know who Smith was, they knew now.
There was no indication that he had recently been criminally sentenced, again, for offences in Canada. His cash-based ministering allowed him a lavish lifestyle in Jamaica; he bought luxury villas, expensive cars, and other assets. Through donation drives, Smith began building his new church, called the Ark, which included stables for livestock and coops for chickens.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit—and evangelical Christians globally, particularly in North America, became some of the most polarizing and contrary voices on restrictions, mask mandates, and vaccines. Together with right-wing news outlets and influencers, they were some of the most jubilant proponents of COVID-19 denialism. Jamaica was not immune to any of it and, with its shrinking economy and high corruption rates, was especially fertile ground for conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment.
Local news coverage picked up on this in 2020, with an editorial in the Jamaica Gleaner stating that “believers think they can do whatever they want, once it is pleasing to their god and they believe they are protected.” A doctor wrote an op-ed arguing “the inconvenient truth is that during this pandemic, many who claimed to be covered with the blood of Jesus are now covered with six feet of dirt and a concrete slab after contracting COVID-19. The virus is no respecter of age, gender, ethnicity, or religious belief.” Today, less than half the population has received a COVID-19 vaccine, among the lowest rates in the Caribbean.
Smith became consumed with COVID-19 conspiracy theories put forward by right-wing outlets in North America. In February 2021, the Washington Post released an investigation into the mass proliferation of anti-vaccine content by Christian ministries and influencers across social media. They were spreading false claims that vaccines contained microchips and ingredients linked to the devil. Many spoke about how vaccines and masks heralded the “mark of the beast,” an apocalyptic phrase from the Book of Revelation that suggests that the Antichrist will require people to put a mark on their bodies in order to participate in commerce. TikTok eventually banned the popular hashtags #MarkOfTheBeastIsTheCovid19Vaccine and #VaccineIsTheMarkofTheBeast.
Smith was obsessed. He became convinced of the harmful impacts of the vaccine—colloquially known in Jamaica as “the juk”—and claimed it would be a form of population control. In May, Smith shared a news article by The Blaze, founded by Glenn Beck and now part of an American conservative media company, about the arrest of Canadian pastor Artur Pawlowski, who held a church service in violation of Alberta’s public health restrictions. “This is abomination persecution of the church in Canada! The world is watching and mouths are closed,” Smith wrote on Facebook. “We must know its coming to Jamaica.” Beginning that summer, Smith posted anti-vaccine rants and news articles daily, sometimes multiple times a day. By October, he was encouraging his followers to pull their money from the banks over fears of global financial collapse.
These types of posts increased markedly through the fall of 2021, as COVID-19 cases soared in Canada and the border with the US remained closed. “Prophecy fulfilled in Canada,” Smith wrote on September 2. “Canada is going to intern dissenters in Concentration Camps. . . . Those who refuse vaccination starting in October will be arrested and force to live in Quarantine Camps.” He frequently posted on Facebook news articles and updates from Canada as evidence that governments were seeking to control the movements of their citizens. “In every province they are putting in place for military checkpoints,” Smith claimed in one Facebook video. “You’re hearing it from me. You need to understand [what’s happening in] Canada.” He spouted other falsehoods, including that the police would be called to arrest those who entered restaurants without proof of vaccination, which he called “the Image of the beast.” Smith wrote in another post that day that anyone who took the vaccine would die. “If you give up your life for Christ Jesus you will save it.”
In mid-September, Smith posted that he believed by October 22, the Jamaican government would “create fictitious legislation that makes mandatory injection lawful. . . . The end game will be to try and deceive us or force us into quarantine concentration camps. . . . Prepare to stand your ground.” Other posts from around this time further suggest that Smith believed all sorts of catastrophes—food shortages, volcanic eruptions—would unfold in the coming weeks.
In the prosecution’s report, one witness states that Smith’s behaviour in person became noticeably stranger over time. He became more adamant that his congregants donate as much money as possible, telling them that if those who had money resisted giving, the member would crash and die, and that Smith would send his wrath out to the member’s family.
On October 12, Smith declared that anyone from the church who took the COVID-19 vaccine would be ejected from membership. Anyone who was vaccinated had no link to God and would be cut off from the light, he said. In a video sermon posted on Facebook on October 14, Smith looked straight into the camera and declared: “My job is the apocalypse. It is the unveiling. It is removing the lid and showing you all things.” The next day, Smith posted instructions for church members to come to the Ark with their photo IDs and membership cards.
On October 16, church members began to gather, dressed in white, as Smith had directed. A service extended until 1 a.m. Smith arrived the following afternoon, after having commanded people to throw away canned food and to fill soda bottles with water. He came alongside church member Kevaughn Plummer and a police officer, who was also a member of the church. Shortly thereafter, Taneka Gardner arrived, too, with her suitcase in tow.
Outside the church, Smith made congregants bow down on their knees before entering, giving them judgment, and writing their names in the “Lamb’s Book of Life,” a Biblical register of those chosen for salvation.
Inside, according to the prosecution’s report, things quickly escalated into a frenzy of action and terror as members lay down on the ground and covered themselves. Smith shouted, “God in the flesh, come in the ark before it closes!” Smith told the members to throw away all tissues, wipes, and soap. While they were disposing of these items, a wine bottle smashed on the floor. Smith told Plummer that he should cut the throat of whoever was in front of the bottle so that they could enter the kingdom of heaven. Smith told another young man, Jordan, that in order for him to make it to heaven, Plummer would have to cut his throat. Jordan (a pseudonym) knelt down in front of Smith and handed the knife to Plummer. But Jordan changed his mind and ran outside the church along with another person. Plummer chased them down and stabbed them both in the back.
Back inside, Smith found Michael Brown, a follower who had been hospitalized for kidney issues. His mother told reporters that he had discharged himself from the hospital after receiving a call to come to the church. “You have to die,” Smith told him, according to the prosecution’s report, “but you will rise again because I am the resurrection and the light.” Smith proceeded to pull the medical tubes from Brown’s body, and he bled to death. Shortly thereafter, Gardner would be dead as well.
Outside, police officers arrived on scene after a church member alerted them to the situation, calling for backup after shots were fired in their direction. After more officers arrived, along with backup from the military, a shootout ensued between them and Smith. Plummer stormed toward the police officers with a knife, and they shot and killed him. Many parishioners tried to run; some were injured. Billy was hospitalized, and survived, after he was shot in the chest by police. Police entered the building and found the deceased bodies of Gardener, Brown, and Plummer. Smith and Ruddock were arrested.
In the days after the incident, police searched Smith’s luxury villas for clues that might explain what happened. On October 25, nearly ten days later, Smith and Ruddock were transported in separate vehicles, with police escorts, from Montego Bay to Kingston, where they were to be each formally charged with murder in the deaths of Gardner and Brown. But instead of taking the highway, the officers took an odd detour through the back roads that would have made the journey considerably longer. As the procession neared Kingston, the driver of Smith’s vehicle collided into two other oncoming vehicles. Smith was pronounced dead at the hospital. One of the police escorts, a twenty-six-year-old constable named Orlando Irons, also died, while two other officers suffered serious injuries.
Social media lit up with speculation. Thousands of people questioned whether the crash was a set-up by the police, the government, or even one of Smith’s followers. In my conversations with observers, they suspected Smith was targeted because he was apparently a close adviser of government officials, who perhaps wanted any secret information he knew to be kept hidden and not be aired out at trial. On November 8, a post-mortem revealed that Smith had died from multiple blunt-force trauma injuries; he was cremated shortly thereafter. According to the coroner’s inquest, Smith had grabbed the shoulder of the driver, causing the accident; it was determined as suicide.
Many religious leaders condemned Smith, likening the incident to a demonic attack. James Saturday, a reverend with the St. Joseph Catholic Church in Jamaica, spoke about the need to help clergy who were struggling. “God had entrusted [Smith] with a ministry. . . . He had the trust of the people but now his actions did not reflect the ministry that God entrusted in him. And he betrayed the trust of the people. If a pastor struggles, the body of Christ, the church, has an obligation to that pastor with personal sins and struggles. The church needs to pray for him, and guide him and lead him.”
More than three years later, the Ark is still standing, abandoned, with debris and dirt throughout. Posters of Smith’s church events remained on the floor, showing him as a younger man alongside other religious leaders and guest speakers. Last year, the property was listed for sale for 37 million Jamaican dollars (around $330,000). The trial for Ruddock, who has been in prison since 2021 on charges for Gardner’s death, is scheduled for January 2026. He is likely to plead not guilty.
Charlton wonders whether he and Wildish could have stopped Smith from going down the path he did. “At least I know there were opportunities where truth was spoken and where he would’ve had an opportunity to decide differently,” Charlton says. “But at the same time, I also know that God never takes away free will . . . you still have to make a personal choice as to what the rest of your journey is going to be.”
Even after his death, misinformation swirls around Smith. Many people I spoke with in Jamaica doubt the events that transpired following his arrest, believing that he is alive and well on a beach somewhere, or even back home in Canada.
