STOCKTON (MO)
Kansas City Star [Kansas City MO]
June 6, 2024
By Judy L Thomas and Laura Bauer
Julio Sandoval was dean of students at Agape Boarding School in Cedar County before leaving to become director of ABM Ministries’ Lighthouse Christian Academy near Piedmont.
He’s been accused in lawsuits of abusing boys, faces a federal criminal charge in California and was found to have abused or neglected students at a southwest Missouri boarding school.
Yet across the state earlier this year, Julio Sandoval was running another school, one that is now closed and under investigation for abusing students during the past two decades.
The school — Lighthouse Christian Academy, operated by ABM Ministries — shut down three months ago after its owners were charged with kidnapping a student.
Wayne County Sheriff Dean Finch said when he began investigating after a string of runaways at ABM, he was “very surprised” to see Sandoval, who was indicted in California in a case involving his side business that transported students to boarding schools, was still working with kids.
Sandoval had been on staff at ABM for more than two years.
“Any time you’re under a federal indictment for anything against a child, you should not be allowed to be around a child, with the exception of your own children,” Finch said. “But as far as being able to be around those kids at that (boarding school), under a federal indictment, I think (that) is a joke. I really do.”
But Missouri law didn’t prevent it. Nor does it prevent anyone who is challenging a substantiated abuse/neglect finding from the state’s Department of Social Services — which Sandoval is doing — from working with kids. Some say that must change.
Sandoval’s presence at yet another Missouri boarding school has drawn the ire of advocates and lawmakers who passed legislation in 2021 to place some regulations on such facilities. The goal then — and now — they said, is to protect students inside these unlicensed schools.
Sandoval should not have been permitted to be around “vulnerable minors” as he challenges the DSS finding, said Rep. Keri Ingle, D-Lee’s Summit and co-sponsor of the legislation regarding unlicensed boarding schools.
“It’s the base of the law that we passed, the base of good child welfare,” Ingle told The Star. “It doesn’t make any sense to me why he would continue to have access to kids.”
Rep. Rudy Veit, the other sponsor of the 2021 legislation, said Tuesday that allowing someone to continue working around kids while challenging a DSS finding was a serious concern.
“That certainly is a problem, and we need to sit down and try to address the issue,” said Veit, R-Wardsville. “We ought to certainly take a look and see if we can amend the statute. It doesn’t seem fair to me, if someone has a substantiated finding and they have done things that were dangerous or did not protect the welfare of children, that we would let them continue to work while the appeal drags out for one or two years.”
Finch also said the law needs to change.
“Pending an appeal means nothing other than prolonging the inevitable,” Finch said. “You know, if he does win it, then by all means he has every right to” work with children again.
“But while it’s under an appeal, I don’t think they should be allowed.”
Sandoval could not be reached for comment, and his Jefferson City attorney handling the DSS challenge did not respond to requests seeking comment.
A court document filed April 18 in Sandoval’s California criminal case said he had recently moved to Arkansas.
In the petition challenging the substantiated abuse/neglect finding by DSS, Sandoval’s attorney wrote that his client “denies that he abused or neglected the minor children at any time.”
A MOVE ACROSS MISSOURI
Additional charges are expected in the ABM Ministries case, Finch said.
Owners Larry and Carmen Musgrave have pleaded not guilty to charges of kidnapping, and their attorney has not responded to multiple requests for comment. That investigation began early this year after five boys ran away from Lighthouse Christian Academy in less than a four-week period.
Soon after the Musgraves were initially jailed, the Wayne County prosecutor charged staff member Caleb Sandoval, 22, with the assault of a child.
According to the probable cause affidavit, he admitted to punching a student in the face multiple times while boxing him as punishment. Caleb Sandoval is Julio Sandoval’s son.
Caleb Sandoval said the teen wasn’t wearing headgear or a mouthpiece, and that at one point his face was bloodied and he fell to the ground, the affidavit said. He admitted to investigators that “he had handled this situation inappropriately,” the document said, and that he had told his father about the incident.
When asked if he was disciplined for handling punishment that way, Caleb Sandoval “said he was not reprimanded or instructed not to do this in the future.”
Caleb’s father was dean of students at Agape Boarding School in February 2021 when the Missouri Highway Patrol launched an investigation into abuse and neglect of students at the Cedar County school in Stockton.
A search warrant application for that case shows that Sandoval spoke to investigators on March 2, 2021, and told them that “pain compliance techniques were regularly used to discipline students at the Agape Boarding School.”
In September 2021, the Cedar County prosecuting attorney charged five staff members with 13 counts of third-degree assault. Sandoval wasn’t among them.
In the fall of 2021, after about 10 years at Agape, Sandoval left the school to go to work for ABM Ministries, a court document said.
“Cedar County got rid of their problem,” Finch said, “and sent it to me.”
Sandoval also ran a transport company that parents hired to take their children from their homes — often in the middle of the night, former students told The Star — and deliver them to boarding schools. His company, Safe Sound Secure Youth Ministries, had employed two off-duty Cedar County Sheriff’s deputies to help pick up so-called troubled teens from across the country. (One of those deputies is the son-in-law of Agape’s late founder and also worked at Agape.)
In August 2022, a federal grand jury in California indicted Sandoval, accusing his transport company of violating a court order by taking a California teen to Agape in handcuffs against his will. Sandoval has pleaded not guilty, and a jury trial is scheduled for October. If convicted, he could receive up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Sandoval also faces a civil lawsuit in connection with the case, filed in August 2023 by the California teen.
Missouri corporation records show Sandoval’s transport company was dissolved in the fall of 2022 for failure to file a registration report with the state.
In September 2022, The Star reported that Missouri’s child welfare agency had substantiated 10 reports of physical abuse at Agape. Sources at the time told The Star several staffers appealed their findings.
Agape closed in January 2023 “due to the lack of financial resources to continue caring for the boys,” its director said.
Missouri’s online court database shows that Sandoval challenged his substantiated neglect finding in circuit court on Feb. 16, 2023. The case has been continued several times, and the last hearing was Feb. 26 of this year.
At that time, his case was continued for another 90 days.
MORE ALLEGATIONS FROM AGAPE
In addition to the federal criminal case, Sandoval has been accused in multiple lawsuits of physically abusing Agape students. And a lawsuit filed last month by a California man alleges that Sandoval physically and sexually abused him.
That lawsuit, filed in federal court in Kansas City by a man going by the initials “PH,” names Agape, five staffers and Cedar County Sheriff James “Jimbob” McCrary as defendants. It says the staff “ran a ‘school’ akin to a concentration camp or torture colony cloaked in the guise of religion.”
The suit said Sandoval “engaged in physical and sexual abuse of Plaintiff, violated the Wilberforce Trafficking Act and engaged in negligence in his role as Dean of Students for Agape.” The Wilberforce Act covers physical abuse and peonage, which is forced labor.
Sandoval also worked part time as a corrections officer for the Cedar County Sheriff’s Department, the lawsuit said. It alleged that Sandoval “was brutal to the boys.”
“He would pit the boys against each other and get them to fight,” it said. “Sandoval would get other students, including PH, to hit and brutalize other students.” On one occasion, the suit said, the students in “Brown Town” — the name given to those with the lowest ranking — were ordered to do 1,000 jumping jacks.
“One of the smaller boys nicknamed ‘Swervin Irvin’ kept messing up; Sandoval gave the other boys food and had them chew it up and spit it on the small boy who was messing up,” the lawsuit alleged.
Another time, the lawsuit said, PH was pulled out of church by two staffers, who began beating him. Sandoval joined in, it said, slamming his head on the tile floor and “dragging PH along the wall, slamming his head against it.”
“After that incident, Plaintiff was petrified of Sandoval. He did whatever Sandoval requested, even bullying or beating up other kids.”
Rebecca Randles, the Kansas City attorney who filed the lawsuit, said Agape staff engaged in brainwashing techniques that caused PH to physically abuse other students.
“After he left the school, he subsequently sent letters of apology and notes of apology,” she said, “because once he got out from underneath the brainwashing techniques they were engaging in, he was able to discern that what they were teaching was wrong, bad and inappropriate.”