Suicide? Mica Miller Did Not Kill Herself

Mica Acacia Miller, 30, was found dead on April 27, 2024, in Lumber River State Park in Robeson County, North Carolina. The North Carolina Medical Examiner’s Office determined she died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

By SyndicatedNews True Crime | SNN.BZ

The Robeson County Sheriff’s Office ruled the death a suicide after reviewing surveillance video, interviews, physical evidence, and the medical examiner’s findings. Officials said they found no evidence of foul play and no indication that her estranged husband, Myrtle Beach pastor John-Paul “J.P.” Miller, was in North Carolina that day.

Those official conclusions have not ended the case in public view. Family members and friends have said they believe years of alleged control, harassment, and isolation inside a tightly led church marriage preceded her death. Miller has denied abuse, pleaded not guilty to later federal charges, and has not been charged in connection with the shooting itself. A Netflix docuseries, Death of the Pastor’s Wife, released this week, has put the record back in front of a national audience.

Who she was

Mica Francis was born March 7, 1994, in Wichita, Kansas, one of six siblings. After the family moved to Myrtle Beach, they joined Solid Rock Church, a nondenominational congregation J.P. Miller founded in 2006. Mica became a worship leader, youth worker, women’s ministry leader, and later the pastor’s assistant. She married her first husband, Jeremy Deas, as a teenager; Miller officiated. In 2015, while both were still married to other people, Mica and Miller began an affair. They married on Nov. 7, 2017. She was 23. He was 38. She became stepmother to his five children from a prior marriage.

The church around them

Solid Rock was not a denomination-supervised parish with an outside bishop. Miller started it with a sermon in a public library and built it into a congregation that, at its peak, drew hundreds and held substantial assets, including real estate, vehicles, and at one point a plane. Former elders later described decision-making as concentrated in Miller and a spiritual adviser. After the scandal of the affair with Mica became public years earlier, some church leaders said they tried to push him toward counseling; he maintained he held full authority. After Mica’s death, the church released him from ministerial duties “for a time of healing,” then later closed. The Market Common property was sold. Miller later started new ministry entities, including Living Water Church at Market Common and, later, Mercy Church. He has continued to preach to a smaller group.

That structure is the factual backdrop for the family’s argument: a young congregant rose inside a pastor-founded church, married the man who led it, and then tried to leave a marriage in which, they say, spiritual language and institutional power were hard to separate from personal control. Miller’s attorneys have said he was trying to protect a wife with documented mental-health crises, not destroy her.

Separation, police reports, and competing accounts

Court filings and police reports from 2023 and 2024 show repeated attempts to separate. Mica filed for divorce in October 2023; that case was dismissed. Miller later filed for separation. Mica filed again in mid-April 2024 and had papers served on Miller on April 25, two days before she died.

In a February 2024 Myrtle Beach police report after an involuntary psychiatric hold, Mica said she had known Miller since she was a child and that he had “groomed” her while she worked at the church until they married. She reported that her car, keys, phone, and laptop were taken while she was hospitalized. Other reports from March 2024 describe slashed or deflated tires and a GPS tracker on her vehicle. She told an officer she was “afraid for her life.” Medical records cited in later reporting list bipolar disorder and dependent personality disorder, prior hospitalizations, and suicidal ideation. Miller publicly said she had recurring episodes, especially when she stopped medication, and that the family had previously gotten her through them.

Those two stories—abuse and coercive control versus untreated mental illness and a husband’s claimed duty to supervise—never fully converged while she was alive.

April 27, 2024

Sheriff’s records reconstruct the last hours from cameras and receipts:

Mid-morning: Mica leaves and returns to her Myrtle Beach apartment on Ring camera.
11:38 a.m.: She leaves again.
12:12 p.m.: She buys a Sig Sauer 9mm handgun at Dick’s Pawn Shop with a debit card.
1:27 p.m.: She stops at a gas station in Mullins, South Carolina.
2:54 p.m.: She calls 911 from an 843 number, asks whether her phone can be traced, and says she is about to kill herself and wants her family to know where to find her. She hangs up. Dispatch cannot reach her again.
Afternoon: A kayaker/fisherman reports hearing crying, then a gunshot, and later finding a body in the water. Her Honda is in the park lot with the gun case, ammunition, and same-day receipts. The matching pistol is at the scene. Two spent casings and one live round are found on the bank about 100 feet from where her body is found face-down in the river by tree limbs. The examiner reported an entrance wound on the right side of the head with a muzzle imprint, an exit on the left, no signs of a struggle, and no concern for foul play. Toxicology did not show common intoxicants.

The next day, before the medical examiner’s formal public confirmation, Miller told Solid Rock the death was “self-induced.” Family members held a separate memorial. They later said Mica had warned that if she were found with a bullet in her head, it would not have been by her own hand. The sheriff’s office said rumors outran evidence and that the ruling had to follow the record they had.

What happened after

Control of Mica’s remains and estate became a legal fight because the couple was still married. Miller had her cremated. Siblings sought administration of the estate. In July 2024 the family and Miller announced a confidential settlement of pending civil disputes and asked protesters to shift energy toward a proposed “coercive control” statute in her name. Sunday demonstrations outside the church had already drawn national attention under the banner “Justice for Mica.”

The criminal track did not stop with the suicide ruling. In December 2025 a federal grand jury in South Carolina indicted John-Paul Miller on one count of cyberstalking and one count of making false statements to federal investigators. Prosecutors allege that from November 2022 until her death he sent unwanted and harassing communications; posted a nude photo of her online without consent; caused tracking devices to be placed on her vehicle; contacted her more than 50 times in a single day; interfered with her finances and daily activities; and damaged her tires. They further allege he lied to the FBI about the tire damage after buying a tire-deflation device. He pleaded not guilty. He is free on a $100,000 bond. The trial has been continued repeatedly and is now set for the October 2026 term. He has not been charged with causing her death. If convicted on the existing counts he faces up to five years on cyberstalking and two years on the false-statement count, plus potential fines.

Miller’s position, through counsel and public comments, has been consistent on the core point: the medical examiner and sheriff already answered how she died. He has acknowledged using tracking and a private investigator and has framed that as an effort to keep a suicidal spouse from obtaining a gun. Prosecutors say the investigator was used to watch her over suspected adultery, not to protect her.

What the record does and does not settle

On the physical event of April 27, the official file is aligned: she bought the gun, drove herself to the park, told 911 she intended to die, and died of a close-range self-inflicted head wound with no documented struggle and no evidence placing Miller at the scene.

On the years before that day, the file is a stack of police reports, affidavits, texts, and now a federal indictment—allegations of grooming inside a pastor-founded church, financial and digital control, public shaming, and a woman who both sought psychiatric care and told officers she feared the man she was leaving. Those claims are for a jury on the cyberstalking counts. They are not a second official manner-of-death finding.

The pattern the family describes—authority gathered in one founder, a teenage congregant folded into ministry and then marriage, exit treated as spiritual failure, mental-health holds used as leverage—is a documented feature of this case’s court and police paper. Whether it is “common” in independent fundamentalist or charismatic churches is a sociological claim, not something a sheriff’s report can prove. What can be said without stretching the record is this: Solid Rock’s own former leaders said power sat with the founder, not an outside anointing body, and Mica’s last legal act was another attempt to get out.

If you are in crisis, call or text 988 in the United States. For domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233 or thehotline.org. And if you know your spouse is trying to kill you – do not be embarrassed to say so – Scream It From The Roof Tops!