Six people – including two children – who disappeared from their homes in eastern Missouri last summer are believed to be in the clutches of an eccentric online cult run by a convicted child molester, police say.
Family members of those missing are also convinced their loved ones are followers of a group founded by Rashad Jamal, a rapper and self-styled new age prophet serving an 18-year sentence in Georgia after his conviction in August.
Police in Berkeley are trying to locate the six, who vanished from a rented house in the city last July after exhibiting what officials said were strange behaviors.
“Neighbors reported seeing these people outside daily, worshipping the sun,” Maj Steve Runge of the Berkeley police department told Fox2 News of St Louis.
“When it was raining, they would come outside naked and run around the yard. They were digging up things in the yard.”
Other neighbors said they saw the group “sitting outside in tall grass with their palms upward on sunny days”, hugging trees and burying coins in the yard.
The missing are Ma’Kayla Wickerson, 25, and her three-year-old daughter Malaiyah; Gerielle German, 26, and her three-year-old-son Ashton Mitchell; and two other adults: Naaman Williams, 29, and Mikayla Thompson, 23, who is Wickerson’s cousin.
They lived together in Wickerson’s home near the St Louis airport before abandoning the property after receiving eviction papers, Runge said.
“She doesn’t usually do things like this. She’s usually very family-oriented. So for her to cut off everybody, quit her job, leave all her belongings behind is not the norm,” Wickerson’s mother, Cartisha Morgan, told KFVS12 News.
“I just want to know that they’re safe. If she chooses to stay away or off the grid, just let us know that you’re safe.” She said her daughter had suffered postpartum depression and other mental issues.
Jamal runs a website aimed at racial minorities called the University of Cosmic Intelligence, which peddles conspiracy theories – including “the truth” about aliens invading a Miami shopping mall. The group calls Earth the planet Ki, and members refer to themselves as the Grand Cosmic Rising Family.
Jamal, whose real last name is White, has a combined social media following of more than 300,000, some of whom consider themselves “sovereign beings” beyond the reach of the law.
He was convicted last year in Georgia’s Barrow county of one count of child molestation and one of child cruelty before being sentenced to 18 years in prison.
In an interview with the St Louis Post-Dispatch, Jamal denied being a cult leader or knowing the missing six people, insisting that police had “put a target on my back” after he learned of their disappearance from TV reports.
“I am pretty sure I have never met these people,” he told the newspaper.
“I get on my phone and I give a lecture. I go live, and then I get off the phone. I do not know the people that are in my live[stream]. It’s too many people.”
