Another staffer at Missouri boarding school arrested; parents told to take sons home
Parents of students at a southeast Missouri boarding school were told Monday to pick up the boys within 48 hours as an investigation into abuse allegations there expands.
Larry and Carmen Musgrave, owners of ABM Ministries south of Piedmont, are charged with first-degree kidnapping. They were held without bond over the weekend but released from the Wayne County Jail in Greenville on Monday.
The husband and wife were ordered to wear GPS location monitoring devices and must stay away from minors under 17, according to Missouri’s online court records. They also must have no contact with the alleged victim or victim’s family or witnesses and must consent to a search of their residence, which is on the campus property.
Their release order also prohibited any contact with the school, which is also known as Lighthouse Christian Academy, except “to notify adult designee to notify custodial parents to retrieve children from the facility.” The unlicensed boarding school is about 330 miles southeast of Kansas City.
Wayne County Sheriff Dean Finch told The Star on Monday evening that he continues to investigate the allegations.
“I’ve already received a call from one parent who was wanting to know how she can get her money back because she’s already paid for the month of March,” the sheriff said.
In the time since the Musgraves were taken into custody Friday night and early Saturday, another staff member was jailed on allegations of abuse or neglect of a child. That staffer was still being held in the Wayne County Jail Tuesday morning.
When the sheriff served the arrest warrants on the Musgraves at the ABM campus, he took several deputies with him, as well as two troopers with the Missouri Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime Control.
Those authorities spoke to all 19 students at the boarding school as well as staff, Finch said Saturday.
In interviews with The Star, a dozen former students have described how they said they were treated at the school over the past nearly 20 years. That included physical abuse and restraints, not being allowed to make eye contact with fellow students, standing for hours at a time staring at a wall when they were in trouble and being forced to do manual labor to benefit the school.
They also detailed how they were often hungry at the school and food was used as a punishment. If they were in trouble, they said, they were given little to eat, such as a tortilla smeared with peanut butter for breakfast or plain white rice for dinner.
And, they said, they had to watch as other students ate large portions of prepared meals.
‘Every aspect of (their) lives were controlled’
The arrests and charges of the Musgraves came more than a week after The Star detailed how several boys had run away from ABM Ministries since Jan. 13.
Two of those boys were helped by a local resident who took them to her home after they flagged her down and asked her to call 911. That resident, and another neighbor, told The Star that the boys were “terrified” and said the 12- and 14-year-old reported that they were hit for no reason or because they didn’t finish chores fast enough.
They also said they were berated by school staff, especially the Musgraves. Deputies picked up the boys and initially returned them to the school.
All five boys who ran away since mid-January have been sent back home, the sheriff said.
Also on Monday, a court affidavit explaining the kidnapping charges against the Musgraves was released. That record shows that a former student told authorities she was locked in a room on her 18th birthday and was kept from going home for months.
The affidavit gives further details about what she said she experienced more than 15 years ago at ABM Ministries.
“Carmen told (the student) that she needed to understand that nobody cared that it was her 18th birthday, and she wasn’t special, and she wasn’t leaving,” the affidavit said. “(She) stayed in the room and was not free to leave the building. All doors were locked and only a staff member had the key.”
The student also described to authorities how she said she and the other students were treated at the school, which at the time also admitted girls.
“The students were told when and how to do everything, to the point of who to look at, when to go to the bathroom, how long you could use the restroom and the amount of toilet paper you could use,” the records said. “Every aspect of (their) lives were controlled.”
The former student described mental and physical abuse, including “really, really hard exercises” that would last for hours. That included running, planks “and things that people see in boot camps,” court records said, adding, “This would occur with no food or water.”
She recalled one time when the students would “run, run, run, run, run” and then Carmen Musgrave would “have like 5-gallon buckets of ice water and there was like a 50 gallon drum filled with ice water.”
“She would make us line up and we would have to dunk our heads all the way under the water and ice,” the student said.
On one occasion, she said, a student was accused of drinking the water. The former student said Carmen held the girl’s head underwater by “holding the back of her neck and pushing her head into the bucket of ice water.”
She said the girl was “freaking out.”
Thinking she could never leave
The Star spoke to the former student last month, and she shared the same experiences she did with Finch when he traveled to Alabama to interview her.
At 17, Julianna Davis said she had already graduated from ABM — which meant she finished the required school work — and figured once she hit 18, she could go home.
“So I woke up on my 18th birthday and Miss Carmen locked me in a room,“ Davis, 34, told The Star. “And she gave everybody else the day off school and let everybody else go play outside and she locked me in a room where I couldn’t leave physically.
“And she told me, ‘You got too excited about your birthday. You need to understand that you’re not special, and nobody gives a crap.’”
The Musgraves’ sentiment, Davis said, was that they didn’t care how old she was: “You’re not leaving here.”
And Davis said she’s not the only one who heard that.
“’Larry Musgrave would tell the students, ‘You are mine until you are 21,’” Davis said. “He would throw in there, ‘Your parents gave you up. You’re ours until you’re 21.’”
Davis said he would tell her she would never go back home. And those words became like a “mental restraint” on her.
“I was literally like, ‘I’m never going to get out of this place.’”
Four months after her 18th birthday, she went home for a visit and then to college. And she never went back to the Show-Me State.
“I’ve always said that I would never step foot back in Missouri unless it was for a rescue mission or something,” Davis said. “And I always said that jokingly, but in the bottom of my heart, I really meant that.
“The only thing I ever wanted is for them to stop doing it. Shut the school down, let the little kids go home and I hope the people there now, the people there in the past, can get appropriate help.”
Last year, Davis graduated with a doctorate of education in trauma counseling. One motivating factor for going into that line of work, she said, was her time at ABM.
For more than a decade, she and other former students have said they tried to share their experiences at the Christian boarding school online and on social media. But they said no one listened.
After they heard several current students had run away, they started speaking out again. Davis said she called the Missouri Highway Patrol and told her story to a trooper.
“He took me seriously and put me in contact with the sheriff,” Davis told The Star. “From the night I first talked to the sheriff on the phone, I knew that he believed me.”
Having charges filed against the Musgraves, she said, “just feels very validating.”
“I mean, we can’t change what happened to us,” Davis said, “but I do think we can stop it from happening to more people.
“And that almost makes it worth it.”
This story was originally published March 4, 2024 at 7:38 PM.
