Who killed Pastor Zeke in The Chi?
The Chi opened its eighth and final season in May 2026 with a funeral at the Church of the Living Water — and a congregation full of people wondering exactly what you're wondering. Pastor Zeke was dead, killed off-screen between seasons, and the show made viewers wait for the name.
It didn't wait long. Spoilers ahead.
The short answer
Nuck killed Pastor Zeke. The season 8 premiere, "The Coldest Winter," strongly pointed to him, and the show later removed all doubt when Nuck admitted to Bakari that he was responsible — he couldn't risk Zeke talking to the police.
Why Nuck did it
The motive was self-preservation, plain and simple. Zeke had gotten tangled up in Nuck's money-laundering operation through the church, and the police came calling. In the premiere, Zeke's ex-wife Carolyn tells Papa what investigators wanted from him:
"The police — they wanted info on one of the guys he was counseling," Carolyn says in the episode.
Carolyn was convinced from the start that Nuck ordered the hit. She was right. In Nuck's world, a pastor with a conscience and a police contact is a liability — so the liability was removed.
Who was Pastor Zeke, again?
Ezekiel "Zeke" Bailey, played by Daniel J. Watts, arrived in season 6 as Kenya's father and the head of a megachurch that rivaled Pastor Stanley Jackson's. He was introduced as an openly corrupt operator — squeezing his congregation for tithes and laundering dirty money for Douda through the church. The cruel irony is his timing: by the time he died, Zeke was deep into a redemption arc, reconnecting with his family and trying to make amends for years of greed.
He got clean just in time to become a witness. That's what killed him.
The fallout
The murder ripples through the final season. Papa, grieving and carrying Carolyn's suspicion, eventually relays it to Tiff — who is still in a relationship with Nuck. Every episode she stays is another episode she's sharing a bed with the man who put a pastor in the ground, and the show mines that tension hard as the series builds toward its ending.
For the record: Zeke isn't even the first pastor this story has buried.
Stanley Jackson was killed for refusing to stay Douda's puppet — the exact job Zeke was hired to replace him in. In Chicago's Church of the Living Water, the pulpit comes with a body count.