DEVILISH DELIGHT
Shot love rival, burned him in barrel, then prayed wildly at service – cops
The devil was inside oft-arrested Derek Whitaker when he took the empty seat in row three for Sunday church services, the exact spot where missing parishioner Jonathan Blake prayed to God each week.
“Right in that seat there,” a still-distraught Dorothy Tomlinson recalled Thursday about the bizarre scene at the White Plains Deliverance Evangelical Center. “You know something was wrong with [Whitaker]. He was delusional. He wasn’t himself … He was shouting, he was acting crazy.”
Whitaker, 53, is now suspected of burning Blake’s corpse inside a barrel in the basement of a Brooklyn apartment building, with cops suspecting the charred victim was killed over a love triangle.
The dead man, identified as Blake by family members, was apparently shot in the head before his remains were torched in the Bedford-Stuyvesant residence where Whitaker works as the superintendent and his mother lives upstairs, according to police sources.
Blake was missing during Sunday’s church service but his family and fellow parishioners had no idea then of his awful fate.
“We didn’t know that [Whitaker] took that young man and killed him, and came to the church,” said Tomlinson. “How do you get over something like that?”
Tomlinson, who turned near-hysterical in recounting the scene, recalled how Whitaker even exchanged a hug with the victim’s unsuspecting brother David Blake — a pastor at the Westchester County house of worship.
“It was so bizarre,” recalled Ray Blake Jr., another brother of the victim. “And this guy had the audacity to come to church and hug my brother.”
Ray Blake Jr. said Whitaker made a giant show of himself during the church service.
“He came down to the altar,” Ray Blake Jr. said. “He was banging on the floors hollering, ‘Jesus, I’m a changed man. I’m a changed man.’ He held up the service for about 30 minutes.”
“I was uncomfortable with how he was behaving,” he added. “But since we’re in church, we try not to interfere with the movement of God … Now I know guilt was killing him. He was crying out from his soul, crying and kicking and screaming.”
Ray Blake Jr. had last spoken to his brother Jonathan Thursday night. He grew worried when there was no sign of him after that. The family went to police after he failed to show for the Sunday service.
A detective told Ray Blake Jr. that Whitaker had been stalking his brother for four to six months before the killing, taking note of where his target worked, ate and lived. Police sources told the Daily News Whitaker might have had an accomplice.
Whitaker is charged with arson, concealing a corpse, hindering prosecution and witness tampering — and he’s likely to be charged with murder, a police source said. His rap sheet includes 19 prior arrests, including a robbery charge.
According to Tomlinson, Whitaker’s attractive ex-wife was working the Sunday service as an usher. After the couple split, Whitaker’s attendance lagged and he did not return for two years before his recent unexpected appearance.
Firefighters responded Monday afternoon to a 911 call of someone burning a corpse in the basement of the building on Jefferson Ave. near Marcus Garvey Blvd. and ran into Whitaker, cops said.
Whitaker even led firefighters