It was the first of nine consecutive days of prayer to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, when Kevin Davey, 25, allegedly blew the head off of a statue of the saint and shot two police officers attempting to investigate the incident. Police did not release any information about the man’s motive, but said he had a history of mental illness.

The drama that unfolded in front of Saints Joachim and Anne Catholic Church on Hollis Avenue in Queens angered Catholics in the city.

“It’s sacrilegious,” Maria Ayala, who spoke to The New York Sun on her way to another Queens church last night, said. “It’s a personal attack on my faith, the Catholic faith.” Ms. Ayala said she personally petitions St. Anne, considered by the Catholic faith to be the patron saint of pregnancy and grandparents. “I went to her to intercede for me to her grandson Jesus – my petition of bearing children one day,” Ms. Ayala said.

A member of Saints Joachim and Anne Catholic Church, Jose Quinones, said he was offended by the beheading of the statue in front of the church, of which he is a longtime member. “We are hurt,” Mr. Quinones said. “We feel somewhat like somebody crashed our cocoon, our little community.”

The Reverend Ernest Falardeau, the assistant pastor at St. Jean Baptiste Church at 184 E. 76th St. in Manhattan, said he was disturbed when he learned of the incident. “That is unconscionable,” he said. “That is quite simply an insult to people that have a strong spiritual attachment” to the statue. The act, he said, is “an attack on religion itself.”

St. Jean Baptiste Church is home to a special shrine, relic, and statue of St. Anne. For every day of the nine-day prayer period, called a novena, the church is holding two special devotion times. The novena culminates in the Feast of St. Anne and St. Joachim (who is considered by Catholics to be Anne’s husband) on July 26.