The First Liberian Civil War had begun in late 1989, when Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia launched an insurgency from neighboring Ivory Coast. By mid-1990, two rival rebel factions were advancing on Monrovia, and President Samuel Doe, a member of the Krahn ethnic group, had retreated to his executive mansion near the coast. His government controlled shrinking portions of the capital. At night, government soldiers from Doe's Armed Forces of Liberia patrolled the streets, targeting people from Nimba County, where the rebellion had originated. Beatings, killings, and looting became routine. Thousands of displaced civilians sought refuge wherever they could find it, filling churches, schools, and compounds throughout the city. St. Peter's Lutheran Church became one of the largest shelters.

The soldiers who entered the church were members of the Armed Forces of Liberia, predominantly from the Krahn ethnic group. The people inside were overwhelmingly Gio and Mano, ethnic groups associated with the rebel movement. The attack was not a battle or a military operation in any conventional sense. It was a massacre of unarmed civilians, many of them women and children, who had gathered precisely because they believed they would be safe. Approximately six hundred people were killed. The scale of the atrocity was so severe that UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar publicly declared himself horrified and called for the protection of civilians in Liberia. The massacre became one of the catalysts for the intervention by the Economic Community of West African States, which sent an armed peacekeeping force to the region.

St. Peter's Lutheran Church was rebuilt at a cost of one million dollars and reconsecrated in August 1993, while the civil war still raged. The rebuilding was an act of defiance as much as restoration, a community declaring that a place of worship would not remain a crime scene. In August 1993, a memorial service drew a thousand people to remember those who had been killed three years earlier. But physical reconstruction could not address the deeper wound. For decades, no one was held accountable for the massacre. Liberia's post-war truth and reconciliation process documented the atrocity, but criminal prosecution remained elusive. The victims' families waited.

In 2018, four survivors of the massacre filed a civil lawsuit in a Philadelphia court against Moses Thomas, a former colonel in the Liberian Special Anti-Terrorist Unit who had been living in Pennsylvania. Thomas denied involvement. On September 15, 2021, the court found him responsible for the massacre, marking the first time any member of the Armed Forces of Liberia had ever been held legally accountable for abuses committed during the civil wars. In August 2022, the court ordered Thomas to pay eighty-four million dollars in damages, six million in compensatory and fifteen million in punitive damages to each of the four plaintiffs. Thomas fled back to Liberia before the ruling. As of today, no one has been criminally tried in Liberia for the massacres committed during the civil war. The church on 14th Street still stands, rebuilt and reconsecrated, a place of worship built on ground that demands remembrance.