WAHNETA - A pastor, his wife and three others were under arrest Wednesday on charges they sold donations for hurricane victims from their church.
Polk County sheriff's deputies raided Mercy House Ministries, where supplies intended for Hurricane Charley and Frances victims were displayed as if in a grocery store, investigators said.
Undercover detectives bought some of the items, originally obtained by church members from a hurricane aid distribution center, before making the arrests.
Pastor Billy Dan Benton, 48, and his wife Pamela, 44, of Lakeland face charges of grand theft and fraud.
They were jailed Tuesday night on $25,000 bail each.
Kristina Pelfrey, 36, and her husband, Thomas Dale Pelfrey, 40, of Winter Haven and Michael James Johnson, 37, of Auburndale, also were arrested on grand theft and fraud charges and were in jail with bail set at $25,000.
The church has been providing food in the rural, largely impoverished community for at least a year.
Mercy House on at least five occasions received large donations of food, baby supplies and other items worth at least $300 from a hurricane distribution center in Bartow, a sheriff's report said.
Undercover deputies noted they bought a can of baby formula marked "sample, not for sale" priced at $1.50.
The church also purchased milk and eggs from a local grocery store and marked up the prices, the Sheriff's Office said.
"It's not a church in any shape or fashion; it looks like a grocery store when you go in there," said Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Carrie Rodgers.
Rodgers said the food on the church's shelves would be photographed and inventoried and returned to the hurricane distribution center where it would be given to needy storm victims.
