“Father, is there somebody asleep back there?”

In the darkness of St. Mary Catholic Church, a Downtown sanctuary rimmed in stained glass so rich that light struggles to penetrate, it wasn’t clear what the boy had found. But when the Rev. Michael O’Mara investigated Saturday morning, he knew he needed to get the children out of the church.

There on the floor of one of Indianapolis’ most beautiful churches, a place where O’Mara regularly teaches about the transient, tenuous nature of life, was the body of a man who, police said, appears to have fallen from the choir loft about 20 feet above the church floor.

“I don’t think I will ever be able to get that image out of my mind,” O’Mara said.

It was the image of a man he knew.

Gregory Fullmer was a 51-year-old homeless man who had confided to the priest a few weeks ago that he didn’t have a dime to his name, not even enough to get his clothes washed. "He said, ‘My clothes are so dirty I’m embarrassed to come to church,’ " O’Mara recalled. The priest gave him a few bucks. At the next service, Fullmer was back — in clean clothes.

St. Mary’s, like many Downtown churches, finds that the homeless are part of the fabric of life. Parishioners volunteer to help them get off the streets. They feed them. And they welcome into their sacred space people who sleep under bridges and on doorsteps — folks who may not look the part of churchgoer.

Fullmer had been coming to St. Mary’s, 317 N. New Jersey St., for about a year. When he joined the church, he gave his address as Wheeler Mission. Over time, Fullmer became a regular volunteer, helping to clean the building when the maintenance man was gone. And he had become something of a church overseer, one time reporting to the priest that he had found an unlocked door and that he had closed it. “He just kind of looked over the church,” O’Mara said.

Fullmer had gone from homeless to having a home to homeless again. It is not an uncommon story on the streets, says Emily Hervey, of the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention.

On Friday, it appears Fullmer decided to spend a rainy night inside the church. O’Mara said he and the staff don’t always check every nook and cranny before locking up. With a couple of blankets, Fullmer appears to have made a bed for himself on the floor of the choir loft. He also brought with him a bottle of vodka.

Police ruled the death accidental, issuing a report that offers little more than a name, a place and a time of discovery. The likely scenario, O’Mara said, is that Fullmer simply became disoriented while drinking and fell.

The priest made the discovery on the morning of Halloween, a day when Hispanic members were to arrive at 11 a.m. to decorate an altar for Monday’s All Souls’ Day celebration, also known as Day of the Dead. A wedding was slated for the afternoon. And O’Mara planned to take a youth group to a haunted house.

With the help of some teens whose parents were volunteering next door, O’Mara came in early Saturday to stuff the weekend church bulletins with information about today’s Wishard Memorial Hospital expansion vote.

But there, beneath a stained glass window depicting Jesus turning water into wine, was Fullmer’s body.

After calling 911, O’Mara asked the kids’ parents if he could break the news to them. And together, they prayed the Hail Mary, a Catholic prayer that concludes with the petition: “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

They had come upon Fullmer’s body not long after the hour of his death.

“Thinking that he died alone — that bothers me,” O’Mara said. “Did he realize that he was falling to his death? Those kinds of questions, I think, are in my heart at this moment.”

As he waited for the police to arrive, O’Mara went back to his friend and prayed for him. Later, he would pray a prayer of purification over the spot where Fullmer fell. He shared the story with parishioners at each of the weekend Masses. And as he presided over Monday’s All Souls’ Day Mass, O’Mara said the meaning of the day has never been clearer.

“We never know when we are going to be confronted by death,” he said. “Certainly, I wouldn’t have expected it on Saturday morning in the church.”