(MO)
Kansas City Star [Kansas City MO]
June 2, 2024
By Laura Bauer
In their days, months and years at a secluded boarding school in southeast Missouri, they say they lost their childhood. Instead of slumber parties with friends, family dinners, campouts — even prom — they spent their time outside doing labor and extensive exercises, were given ice bucket showers and forced to stand at a wall for hours when in trouble, and too often went to bed hungry when food was withheld.
All of this was at a faith-based unlicensed school where they say the smallest of students would get the worst treatment. These are not students of Circle of Hope Girls Ranch and Agape Boarding School, facilities in Missouri that were investigated in 2020 and 2021 and are now closed. They attended Lighthouse Christian Academy, yet another Missouri unlicensed boarding school that until recently operated for two decades unchecked by local and state authorities. Some were taken to the campus by force, others were dropped off by parents who were lured into thinking the school, run by ABM Ministries, would help their children and straighten them out through strong discipline and the word of God. Literature promoting the school touted horses and other animals, and parents were told their children would learn responsibility by caring for them.
Former ABM students, though, say they learned little at the school, other than how to endure the harsh environment and live with the pain. “After a certain amount of time out there, I realized it was just keep your head down. Don’t ask questions,” Aaron Blackburn, now 32, said. “We knew what needed to be done to make your time easier if possible. … It was a survival thing.”
The Star has spoken to more than a dozen former students in the days before and after owners of the school — Larry and Carmen Musgrave, ages 57 and 64 — were charged with kidnapping in March and the school ultimately closed. Both have pleaded not guilty and their attorney did not respond to multiple calls for comment. Their arrests, says Wayne County Sheriff Dean Finch, were just the beginning of an extensive investigation. When investigators spoke to Larry Musgrave after his arrest, he denied everything, the sheriff said.
Whenever we interviewed him, he laughed about it,” Finch said. “And he said, ‘That is not going on. That never happened.’” For many former students, hearing that Finch had arrested the owners of the school was also the beginning of their healing — something they say they’ve been desperate for. “It’s the first time I could breathe in 13 years,” said Michael McCarthy, who left ABM in 2012 and cried after he learned that “Mr. Larry” and “Miss Carmen” had been arrested. “It just felt very vindicating. People were listening to us. “It’s all amazing, you know?”
‘CHILDREN ARE SCREAMING FOR YOU TO HELP THEM’
Weeks before the Musgraves were arrested and charged, Aralysa Baker told The Star that the couple had fooled authorities and others for decades. “They’re not what you think they are,” the former student said in February after several current students had run away. “They might have painted themselves as really doing the Lord’s work. They are not. They’re abusing those kids just like they abused me and my fellow classmates.”
“And even though you walk through the door (of the school), and you think that everything is fine, those children are screaming for you to help them.” Baker said she knows that because nearly two decades ago, she was one of those children. And she still thinks about the time she could have said something and didn’t. Today, Baker — a stay-at-home mom in Oklahoma — is one of the leaders of a group of former students who stay connected on Facebook and a group chat. Many of them went to the Wayne County unlicensed school between 2004 and 2015.
Several years ago they tried spreading the word on social media and forums about the abuse they say they suffered there. Their main goal was to help the kids still at the school. Nothing came of that effort. But when several boys fled the school over a period of three weeks in January, they came together again. Knowing that they would need to be the voice of those attending the school now. And wishing that someone had done that for them.
In 2007, when girls were still part of the school and Baker was a student, she was “yanked out of the shower” one day to talk to a law enforcement officer. He had come to do a “welfare check on me.” After she had been at the school for nearly two years, her great-grandparents finally found out where she was and wanted to make sure she was OK. “Carmen told me … don’t even say a word,” Baker said. “I threw on all my clothes. And whenever I went out there, (the officer) asked me if I was OK and I just shook my head. “I didn’t make eye contact with him. I stepped away from him. We were in the hallway and Larry and Carmen were like, staring me down. I know they had eyes on me.”
She said she also knew that if she said anything about the constant berating, the withholding of food and students being restrained by staff leaders, she would be punished once the officer left. Plus, she said, the Musgraves constantly drilled into students’ heads that authorities were on their side. “The fear that runs through your head is he’s not going to believe me,” said Baker, now 31. “I’m gonna say that something bad is happening. And then it’s gonna get back to Larry and Carmen and I don’t know what they’re gonna do to me. I just keep my mouth shut, so I don’t get in trouble. “… I barely answered yes or no to anything that (the officer) said and he ended up leaving,” Baker said. “And then Carmen gave me a pat on the back and told me I did a good job.”
On that day, she wasn’t punished. But throughout her more than two years at the school, Baker said she was mentally and physically abused and saw many other students treated the same way. “Carmen could manhandle anybody,” Baker said. “She could take down the girls, she could take down the boys — it didn’t matter. That woman is strong, at least she was whenever I was there. She had no problem throwing us around.”
Larry, she said, “liked to put people in headlocks.” “I thought I was the only one,” Baker said. “I was not.” What she struggled with then, and still does, is how staff treated the little kids, as young as 8 and 9.“
The older boys, they (staff leaders) had no problem taking them down,” Baker said. “But they didn’t instigate those physical altercations the way that they did with the smaller kids.” One young boy in particular, who she and other former students said was constantly taunted and abused by staff, has stayed in her mind since she left the school in December 2007. She never knew how long he stayed at ABM and how he survived, both physically and mentally. “He was so little,” she said. “He very much had the brunt of the treatment.”
During Baker’s interview with the Wayne County sheriff, she spoke about this student and the abuse she said he endured. “I drew a diagram of the dining hall so I could show the sheriff, ‘You know, this is the table (the young boy) was sitting at whenever (a staff leader) picked him up and slammed him between the wall and the table. I wanted him to know I saw it with my own two eyeballs.” When one of the former students in the group chat said in March that he found that student online and he was doing well, “it was like an explosion went off,” Baker said. Everyone wanted to know how he was doing and where he was.
Her former classmate is living in the Midwest and is married. Baker was able to talk with him over the phone. “Goosebumps,” she said of her reaction when she learned he was doing well. “I started crying.”