Former pastor John-Paul Miller says he spent months trying to get his estranged wife, Mica Miller, to take lithium and stay with him before she was found dead in April.

Officials ruled it a suicide, but the woman’s family has called for a thorough investigation of Mica Miller’s death, which happened while she was pursuing a divorce. Meanwhile, John-Paul Miller continues to deny any involvement, telling NewsNation he “saw it coming for years.”

He sat down with NewsNation’s Rich McHugh for an exclusive interview about the months leading up to Mica Miller’s death and the public speculation that spread in its wake.

“Now that some of the emotion has died down in the world and with people that are led by their feelings, they deserve to hear some logic and some truth and make their own assessment,” he said.

Mica Miller, 30, was found dead April 27 at Lumber State Park in Lumberton, North Carolina — about 70 miles north of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In court filings, she accused her pastor husband of stealing her car, installing a tracking device, hospitalizing her against her will and “grooming” her when she was 10 years old.

However, John-Paul Miller, a former pastor at Solid Rock Church, says the final months of his wife’s life felt like the “whole world” was against him. He spent his days sounding the alarms about Mica Miller’s state and trying to persuade her to take medicine for her reported mental health struggles, he said.

“You don’t want to say ‘I told you so’ because it’s a horrible thing,” John-Paul Miller told NewsNation. “That’s what I felt like. I felt like, ‘I told y’all.’ I told her family this so many times you can’t imagine. I told her friends this. I told everybody. I said, ‘If y’all don’t get her lithium, she’s gonna commit suicide.’” Mica Miller’s family and friends have said they were heeding a different set of warnings. The woman’s family described John-Paul Miller as feeling like “he owned her,” laying out in court documents alleged patterns of “abuse and violence” and saying she was afraid for her life.

“Mica stated to me on many occasions, ‘If I end up with a bullet in my head, it was JP,’” Mica Miller’s sister, Sierra Francis, said in an affidavit asking to be named the special administrator of Mica’s estate.

Having “finally” received permission from his attorneys to speak on the matter, John-Paul Miller says he worries “people don’t care to hear the truth.”

“They just want to go off their feelings and believe whoever screams the loudest rather than whoever has the proof of what happened,” he said.

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