The headlines were shocking. A woman had broken free from her kidnappers, who had been holding her in a south St. Louis church. She'd been bound by rope and was bleeding from the head. After she made her desperate escape to a nearby residential street, she led police back to the church, where they arrested three African immigrants and charged them with kidnapping.
And then things got even wilder.
Prosecutors questioned whether the Mount of Olives Ministry in the city's Patch neighborhood could be tantamount to a cult. St. Louis police officers found a room of women wearing white veils who seemed freaked out to be interrupted. They also found a series of makeshift basement bedrooms, suggesting people were staying for days on end. The City of St. Louis swiftly condemned the church building.
The kidnapping charges against three parishioners are making their way through court (two of the three men remain locked up at the City Justice Center). But church leaders appear to be persuading city officials that the kidnapping does not signify a violent cult in the midst of south city.
Instead, they say, the apparent red flags spotted by police and building inspectors on their visits suggest a cultural misunderstanding.
Defense attorney Chris Combs represents Grace Kipendo, 28, one of the three men arrested. Combs has argued in two separate bond hearings for Kipendo that not only did police arrest the wrong men for the kidnapping, but that Mount of Olives Ministry has been painted unfairly by police, prosecutors and the media.
Combs said that Mount of Olives is a Christian church comprised mostly of African immigrants. Services are conducted Swahili.
"Calling them a cult is racist," Combs told St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Heather Hays. "I have no problem saying that."
Troubling Allegations
It's safe to say that both police and prosecutors were extremely troubled by what they encountered when the kidnapped woman led them to Mount of Olives Ministry.
In court, Assistant Circuit Attorney Chris Faerber described cult-like conditions and said he'd be reaching out to federal prosecutors with an expertise in international trafficking cases.
He said that officers at the scene reported members of the church referring to women as "angels," and that there was a "white room" where there were women referred to as "good angels" who wore white veils.
"Officers tried to lift their veils to check on their well-being and the women started screaming," Faerber told Judge Hays.
Faerber quoted one of the officers at the scene who said, "If I hadn't seen this with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it."
Police had initially been called to the nearby 8300 block of Minnesota Avenue because the victim was "crying out to passersby who were not members of the church," according to Faerber.
According to the police probable cause statement, the victim said she was kept locked in a room where she was beaten and given only water. After police arrived, the victim led officers to a different room, one that wasn't the "white room," which had its doorknob broken off and, inside, a bucket being used as a makeshift toilet.
In addition to Kipendo, two other men — Pasi Heri, 32, of Dutchtown, and Mmunga Fungamali, 25, who had just arrived in the United States from Canada days before his arrest — were charged with felony kidnapping and assault.
Kipendo's attorney Combs said that while the victim is indeed a victim, police arrested the wrong men, in part due to a language barrier between many of the people involved and the police. Combs said the church has been active since at least 2018 and has never before had an incident.
"No one is denying there is a victim in this case," he said, even while arguing that Kipendo wasn't the one who was responsible for her injuries. "Grace was there to translate between the victim's mother and the officers. He can't believe he's gotten wrapped up in this."
Kipendo is active-duty U.S. military and until last year was serving in Germany. He is originally from the Congo and became a U.S. citizen in 2010.
Combs added, "There are some serious issues in this case that are going to come to light," and those issues have to do with the language barrier between the police and others involved.
At Kipendo's February 26 bond hearing, the sister and mother of the victim were in court to support Kipendo, Fungamali and Heri. So were about a dozen other church members. Combs said that the victim in the case had been brought from Kansas City to St. Louis for mental health treatment before her ordeal.
The prosecutor, Faerber, said that the victim's family had put her in the church for what they termed "healing." He added that even though the victim was supposedly in protective custody at an undisclosed hospital, some church members figured out what hospital she was at and began calling there, trying to speak to her. One of these callers identified himself as a "DA" for the city, though notably St. Louis has circuit attorneys, not district attorneys.
In court that day, Judge Hays acknowledged there were "many conflicting facts" in the case and ruled that Kipendo should remain held without bond.
Heri's and Fungamali's bond hearings were delayed so that a Swahili interpreter could be present. They were subsequently denied bond as well, although Heri was released late last week pending trial.
On February 26, an RFT reporter went to the Mount of Olives Ministry and talked to a man in the parking lot who said he was Pastor Dany Stephen. Stephen said that someone had slapped the victim but that it wasn't any of the three men arrested.
"Why are you holding these three people, innocent people?" he said.
Like the victim, Stephen said he was visiting the church from Kansas City. He said he'd worked with the victim's family when they were new to the U.S.
Stephen was present in the courtroom along with other parishioners at the first of the three men's bond hearings, but subsequently headed back to the other side of the state.
It wasn't his first time bearing witness to the fallout from a violent crime. Stephen was the person who discovered a horrendous scene nine years ago at his sister-in-law Marie Chishahayo's Kansas City home.
He found the home in disarray, her two- and three-year-old daughters severely burned. The three-year-old required skin grafts at a local hospital. The two-year-old soon died.
Police later determined the burns had been administered by Chishahayo's nine-year-old son with the blessing of his mother, who had caught one of her daughters touching her own vagina and "showing the other children how to do it."
When authorities asked why she would allow her son to burn his sisters with a heated knife, Chishahayo said, "God told him to."
Inside the Church
When news got out that a kidnapping had gone down at the church next door and that prosecutors alleged cult-like conditions within, Robin Jernigan was not surprised.
Jernigan said she knew something bad was going to happen "ever since they moved in here."
For the past nine years she's lived at her current home on Minnesota Avenue in the Patch neighborhood. Her backyard abuts the Mount of Olives Ministry church property.
Jernigan said that men have regularly hung out behind the church in the area that backs up to her backyard. She said they broke branches off trees, sharpened them and threw them at her dog. They threw rocks at her dog, too, she said.
"I got to sit outside with a pistol," she said, adding that one church member regularly wore a makeshift security outfit and stationed himself between the church's property and hers.
Jernigan said it's "mostly men" she's seen hanging out outside the building, and she recognized two of the men who were arrested.
For all of Jernigan's queasy feelings, it was the suggestion that church members were living — or, potentially, being held — in makeshift rooms in the basement that quickly got the attention of the City of St. Louis. While churches enjoy some flexibility in municipal building codes, residential use is not among them. The city condemned the church on February 26 to buy a little time to see what was really going on.
When the city reinspected the premises on March 5, the RFT tagged along at the invitation of church members.
Much of what we saw was what you'd expect to see at any church, including a sanctuary with pews.
However, the church basement includes a long back hallway with approximately 10 small rooms branching off from it.
Church officials said they are "prayer rooms," and in court, defense attorneys for the three arrested men have acknowledged that roughly three to five people lived at the church at any given time. However, the site visit showed the church was capable of housing many more than that. Each of the rooms contained multiple beds and personal items, including an ironing board, a stereo, toys and a child's sippy cup.
The room where the victim claimed she was held captive was a different story — a bare-bones room sectioned off with a curtain.
On the day church members showed the inspectors, and the RFT, the room, it had no bed, no personal items, just two uncomfortable chairs. On one, someone had placed a potted plant.
"This Is Cultural"
At Mount of Olives, church supporters and city officials say that prayer and worship can be days-long affairs, even lasting weeks or an entire month. That puts the church in an unusual position in terms of how it is zoned.
Both sides say they are working collaboratively to figure out how to accommodate both the church and public safety. The kidnapping is a serious crime that will have to be adjudicated — but for now, services are again allowed at the site where it happened, with the city's blessing. The city lifted the condemnation notice and allowed the church to reopen one day after the reinspection.
On March 12, the church's lead pastor, Anna Nyassa, and others affiliated with the church met with members of the city's Building Division as part of what the city calls a "fact-finding mission."
"I'm told the meeting was generally positive," said City Hall spokesman Conner Kerrigan. "With a focus on finding a solution that satisfies the church's method of worship without compromising the health, safety or welfare of the public or the community."
Pastor Arlie Singleton, who shepherds a nearby church, was also in the meeting, and said it was "amicable, gracious."
Singleton says that much of what occurred can be chalked up to a cultural misunderstanding. He says he has firsthand experience with Mount of Olives; for a year, the Friendship Assembly of God church where he's pastor shared the church building on Marceau Street with them. Singleton's congregation moved to nearby Lemay in 2019, selling the building to Mount of Olives.
Singleton says he understands how the church could have struck city officials as unusual. Some of what they did struck Friendship Assembly of God parishioners as unusual, too. Services run very, very long. It's common for groups of people to spend 48 hours at a time in the church fasting and praying. Church leaders often stay in the facility from Friday until Sunday. Occasionally, some worshippers will spend as long as 30 days in the church fasting and praying, and then go back to their normal lives after the month is up.
"That is a natural part of what they would do that is outside of the way that we would typically use our church in the United States," Singleton says. "This is cultural."
Though this likely strikes many people as strange, Singleton adds, none of it is nefarious. (In some ways, these extended prayer retreats might be akin to what monks have done for centuries.)
"They were having church the way they understand a church," Singleton says. "They were given the occupancy permit to have a church. So they thought they were fine."
At the most recent meeting between the city and Mount of Olives, the church elaborated that people aren't living there, that they just have a very long way of worshiping, involving prayer that can take weeks. The city and the church are, for lack of a better term, trying to "square that circle" and find a way for Mount of Olives parishioners to worship in a way that is culturally appropriate to them without putting anyone's safety at risk.
Blair Gadsby, a religious studies PhD student at Arizona State University who researches religious practices in Mombasa, Kenya, says that nothing about what was going on at Mount of Olives strikes him as inherently odd. In his experience in Mombasa, for instance, it is not at all uncommon for parishioners to sleep in churches.
As for the notion of women in white getting agitated when police approach, he said, "Let's just compare it to if a police officer went into a situation and tried to lift up a Muslim woman's veil, how would we feel about that?"
As for the room with the "angels," Singleton says Nyassa tells him it was a bad translation.
From an optics standpoint, it does not help the church that leadership has yet to issue any sort of public statement — something you would expect of most congregations if their property had been used for a brutal kidnapping.
Church members the RFT has spoken to say such a statement is forthcoming, and has been for some time.
Singleton says there's reason for the delay.
"The people who are the leaders of the church are the ones that don't speak English good enough to communicate without being concerned that they're going to do it wrong," Singleton says. "So it's the younger people in the church who are actually more likely to communicate, but they're not the leaders."
Singleton is an adroit explainer for the church and its religious practices, but the alleged kidnapping is beyond his explanations.
"The church does not condone beating people," Singleton says. "However, in the Congolese culture, it might be acceptable if a man beat his wife. They might not think anything of it. People come over, and it may not be that it wouldn't happen. But it's not what the church teaches."
Singleton says the victim was previously brought to the church by her mother last May, suffering an unspecified psychological issue. She appears to have remained living there at least part time until the incident in February.
That night, the church was hosting a group of parishioners partaking in a 31-day fast. (One of the arrested men, Fungamali, flew in from Canada specifically for the fast.) On the other side of the church, the young woman suffered another psychological breakdown.
Singleton says that, based on his conversations with Nyassa, everyone's best guess is that the woman became violent and someone at the church actually tied her up as a way of restraining her. Singleton says this "wasn't to be malicious" but rather "so that she wouldn't either harm herself or keep destroying stuff."
But despite the unresolved questions around what was done to her, and who was responsible, Missouri law is pretty squarely on the church's side when it comes to being allowed to continue to operate, according to attorney Dave Roland, litigation director of the Freedom Center of Missouri.
That's because, according to Roland, in addition to First Amendment protections prohibiting any government action that limits the free expression of religion, and additional protections under the state constitution, Missouri has the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, one of the strongest state laws in the country.
"That basically means that the government has got to have an extraordinarily good reason before they can do anything that infringes on a religious belief," he says. "As long as the behavior is substantially motivated by the religious belief, it is protected."
But, Roland adds, "When it comes to kidnapping, that's a different matter."
An Injured Victim
To Roland's point, although a lot of the drama that has played out around the church could be rooted in cultural misunderstanding, that does nothing to explain why a woman who was herself very familiar with the church has claimed she was kidnapped there.
No one on any side of this issue disputes there was a woman with rope marks on her wrists and ankles who led police to a room where she said she was held against her will and forced to use a makeshift toilet. And the makeshift toilet does appear to be documented on body cam footage.
And while Combs, the defense attorney for Kipendo, says his client is innocent, he also says he's spoken to people involved with the church who say they know who actually tied up the woman. It's unclear why the church doesn't present that individual for the sake of the two men who remain in jail on kidnapping charges.
Each of the three accused kidnappers has appeared in court at least once. None of their attorneys has claimed that the woman did not suffer abuse while inside the church.
"She was tied up, but what the reason was for it is a little bit unclear," says Justin Summary, the attorney for Fungamali. "It's tough to gather whether this had anything at all to do with the church."
"There's a language issue. There's a cultural issue. There's a woman, the victim, who's had some kind of issues of her own," Summary adds. "All those things are kind of muddying the waters as to what actually happened."
Summary notes that his client, at least, has given him a lot to work with in terms of building a defense. For instance, the probable cause statement says that the victim was initially held against her will starting on Wednesday, February 21, and made her escape three days later, in the early hours of Saturday. But Fungamali didn't fly into St. Louis for the first time until that Wednesday, when he arrived from Canada around 10 p.m. He says he didn't even get his bags and make his way to the city proper until Thursday.
"It's like a bad episode of Locked Up Abroad," says Summary. "He's never been in the United States before and arrives and is arrested 36 hours later. So he's, you know, confused as to what's going on."
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