By Devin Thomas O'Shea and Samir Knox
In an email dated Aug. 7, 2018, Rodriquez — described in the Epstein files as his “island manager” — sent her boss a list of five schools and asked him to weigh in on placing her teenage daughter.
Wedged between options in Orlando and San Diego was one name far from either coast: Wings of Faith Academy, a private Christian boarding school for “troubled girls” in southwest Missouri.
Epstein replied with a quick directive: “check them out, with comments etc. lakeland. orlando missour . first ?”
Rodriquez ultimately chose Piney Woods School for Girls in Mississippi, but Wings of Faith’s appearance in Epstein’s correspondence draws new attention to a Missouri network of faith-based residential boarding schools which have faced years of abuse allegations and prompted lawmakers to adopt limited oversight reforms.
Wings of Faith has been accused by former students of physical and psychological abuse. It also operated alongside Agape Ranch, the now-shuttered boys’ program whose treatment of students drew statewide scrutiny, and it was part of a broader pipeline of private boarding schools that has repeatedly drawn complaints, eluded oversight and prompted piecemeal reforms.
“The troubled teen industry is a hotbed of abuse,” Ryan Fraizer, a Kansas City attorney who specializing in personal injury and sexual abuse cases, told The Independent.. “I’m not surprised to see a Missouri boarding school in this context.”
Over the last five years, Fraizer’s law firm, Monsees & Mayer, has litigated upward of 70 cases against Agape Ranch. Former students at Wings of Faith are calling for litigation.
“Unfortunately,” said Fraizer, because of a lack of oversight or legal protections, “our state is a target for these facilities.”
The founders of Wings of Faith Academy, which closed in 2022 for “health reasons,” could not be reached for comment.
Allegations of abuse
“The transporter took me out of bed early in the morning,” Evans said in a recent interview with The Independent. “He carried a little paper that claimed he had legal guardianship, and said that my mom was following in another car behind ours. I thought I was dreaming so I didn’t ask so many questions.”
Without her knowledge, Evans’ mother had enrolled her in Wings of Faith Academy. Evans’ peers and teachers did not know where she had been taken, and her father, who was living in Ukraine, did not find out about Wings of Faith for months.
Wings of Faith was a militaristic Christian institution, Evans said, with staff patrolling up and down the aisles between beds at night.
“There was a color system,” Evans said. “So if you were cheating you had to wear a green shirt, and didn’t get as much food or water as everyone else, and you had to memorize more scripture.”
Yellow meant more severe rationing and punishment. Grey was worse.
“I was put on grey when I first got there because I tried to run away,” Evans said.
During the attempted escape, Evans says she ended up with nowhere to go, in a field near Agape Ranch, having injured herself on barbed wire.
“I sliced my leg and my hands open pretty good,” she said. “When I got back to the school they made me strip down and hosed me off. They made me pour alcohol all over.”
As punishment for the escape attempt, Evans says she was made to face the wall all day, and could only fill her small water bottle once in the morning.
“They put me on flip flop status so that it was harder to run away,” she said. “You know when you injure your foot and they put that boot on you? I had to wear one of those.”
Wings of Faith Academy was operated by Percy “Bud” Martin II and Debbie Martin. The Kansas City Starreported the Martins started in Tennessee and relocated to at least two other states in order to establish their school in Stockton in 2004, which went through multiple name changes.
Neither responded to a request for comment.
Former students like Evans and those who have testified at legislative hearings over the years have alleged that in addition to enduring abuse, they were also denied medical care.
“They would just give us essential oils,” Evans said. “They thought that would cure everything even if we were all throwing up because we all had a stomach virus.”
Evans’ cohort ranged from 8 to 18 years-old, with many girls coming from foster care.
“We weren’t allowed to talk about our past lives, we weren’t allowed to sing songs or touch each other or braid each other’s hair,” she said. “They timed our showers… I got caught sharing my bras with another girl whose parents weren’t sending her clothes, so they just took all of mine.”
Evans says her six months at Wings of Faith were traumatic, with the school’s attempts at education and reform amounting to increasingly intense forms of abuse.
“There was a fourteen-year-old girl named Molly who had a learning disability,” Evans said. ”She would have outbursts, and night terrors, and so the staff would force her to do jumping jacks for hours and hours.”
Staff from Agape Ranch were common at Wings of Faith, Evans said, and every Sunday, mass was held with both boys and girls classes in the same church. The chairs were turned away from one another to prevent visual contact, but Evans recalls that boys and girls exchanged notes between each other, sometimes hidden in chairs.
In these notes, boys at Agape Ranch communicated that they were being physically abused, Evans said, and made to do excessive manual labor under threat of physical violence.
“Staff members would slam you on the ground,” said Colton Schrag, a former student at Agape. “Slam you into walls, pick you up by the collar and just slam you around. Staff members would jump on you. If you resisted any, they would start kneeing you, hitting you, just mashing your face into the tile or concrete, wherever it was.”
Push for legislative action
But the new framework hasn’t resolved every concern. In 2022, a Cole County judge ruled that Agape director Bryan Clemensen could remain off Missouri’s child-abuse registry. The order barred Clemensen from initiating physical contact with students, but allowed him to keep working at the school.
Wings of Faith, though less widely known than Agape, has also been the subject of complaints from former students. Some have described what they experienced as psychologically damaging, and others have alleged physical mistreatment by the Martins — allegations they have vehemently denied.
A spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Social Services, which handles licensure for boarding schools, told The Independent that Bud Martin was mistakenly listed for at least two years on state records tied to a St. Louis-area boarding school — a school that said it had no connection to him.
The agency said Martin passed a background check, and that Wings of Faith qualified as a license-exempt agency before it shut down.
Evans, the former Wings of Faith student, is now a preschool teacher in the Chicago area.
“Kids aren’t inherently bad,” Evans concluded, “and the boarding school network doesn’t help bad kids become good. It makes them feel bad about themselves. I don’t think any kid is bad. They’re learning.”
With 45 years of advocate experience, including work with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, Davis Clohessy believes current law is not enough.
“There have been no appreciable consequences for institutions failing to register with the state,” he said. “I think that measure was significant only in that it was the first tiny step in many steps that are needed.”
More legislation is pending. The Missouri House last week approved legislation that would expand Missouri’s statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse claims, giving survivors more time to bring civil lawsuits against abusers and institutions, and allow those changes to apply retroactively.
Another bill seeks to create a path to make it easier for unlicensed Christian residential facilities to receive state placements of foster children, drawing criticism from some advocates that it could shelter bad actors from state oversight.
“When any of us face horror,” Clohessy said, “we are usually desperate to find a quick and simple solution, but these kinds of horrors are ongoing and deeply rooted, and there is no silver bullet.”
Nonetheless, he says expanding the statute of limitations is a step in the right direction.
“If you crack that courthouse door open,” Clohessy said, “and you let the victims expose the horror, then a lot can change.”
