When they got there, parishioners were holding down a 56-year-old man, accused of impeding the service by dumping whiskey into the holy water and threatening to hurt attendees, deputies said. As church attendees were removing the man from the building, he tried to hit several people with the bottle of whiskey, deputies said.

Later in the night at a midnight mass at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Leonardtown, Maryland, Von Goetz turned up with a bottle of whiskey and allegedly disrupted the service by pouring it into the holy water before threatening to harm the parishioners.