JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Yet one more civil lawsuit filed Wednesday towards a Missouri Christian boarding college by a former scholar accuses staffers of compelled little one labor, bodily abuse and ways aimed toward hiding mistreatment from authorities.
The lawsuit, filed in Missouri’s Western U.S. District Court docket, alleges fraud and negligence by 5 former staff of the now-closed Agape Boarding College.
Greater than a dozen different former college students have settled lawsuits alleging they had been abused on the southwest Missouri college.
When it shut down in 2023, it was the fourth and final unlicensed Christian boarding college to shut in Cedar County since September 2020. The varsity’s former director, Bryan Clemensen, stated the varsity, whose enrollment had tumbled, closed as a result of it didn’t have the funding to proceed.
A number of individuals affiliated with these faculties are going through criminal charges.
Advocates for victims of abuse at Missouri boarding schools in Could and once more on Wednesday urged the state’s lawyer common to launch an investigation, work with native prosecutors and take different steps aimed toward stemming the tide of abuse.
An lawyer common spokesperson didn’t instantly reply to an Related Press request for remark Wednesday. However beforehand, Legal professional Normal Andrew Bailey’s spokesperson, Madeline Sieren, has stated that the lawyer common’s workplace doesn’t have jurisdiction to prosecute felony instances, besides when appointed as particular prosecutor by the governor or a court docket.
The most recent lawsuit claims that Agape “ran a ‘college’ akin to a focus camp or torture colony cloaked within the guise of faith.”
Attorneys for 3 of the named defendants didn’t instantly return AP requests for remark. Attorneys weren’t instantly listed in on-line court docket information for the remaining two defendants.
The previous scholar who’s suing is now 20 years previous and is recognized in court docket filings solely as John Doe.
Punishments given by staffers at Agape included forcing youngsters to work out till they vomited and keep nonetheless in painful positions for hours at a time, the lawsuit states.
“There was a restraint room under the cafeteria. College students had been usually taken there and restrained; they may very well be heard screaming,” in line with the lawsuit. “This went on for hours.”
Doe claims in his lawsuit that the staffers restricted college students’ cellphone use and their letters to dwelling in an try to hide situations on the college from their mother and father and “actively hid from the Youngsters’s Division abuses that had been occurring.”
Doe, who first went to Agape at age 15, stated workers additionally “brainwashed” him and others to make it simpler to commit abuse.
The lawsuit claimed staff “prevented the kids from receiving letters or care packages despatched to them by their mother and father inflicting the kids to imagine they’d been deserted thereby emotionally coercing them into silence as a way to conceal their abuses.”
Doe requested the choose for a jury trial and cash from the defendants.
Different former Agape college students got here ahead with abuse allegations in 2020. One former scholar stated he was raped at Agape and known as “seizure boy” due to his epilepsy. Others stated they suffered everlasting accidents from being disciplined or compelled to work lengthy hours of guide labor.
In 2021, Agape’s longtime doctor, David Smock, was charged with little one intercourse crimes and five employees were charged with low-level abuse counts.
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