A half-dozen people in Missouri who were reported missing in August are believed to have been lured into a cult led by a convicted child molester, police said.
The cult is led by Rashad Jamal, who is serving an 18-year prison sentence in Georgia after he was convicted in August of one count of child molestation and one count of cruelty to children, police in the St. Louis suburb of Berkeley said.
"I would like to know that they're OK so that I can get a good night's sleep," Shelita Gibson, whose daughter and grandson are among the missing, told KSDK.
Gibson's daughter, Gerielle German, 26, and 3-year-old grandson, Ashton Mitchell, were last seen with the four other missing people in August.
The pair and the four others, Naaman Williams, 29, Mikayla Thompson, 23, Ma'Kayla Wickerson, 25, and her 3-year daughter, Malaiyah, had all been living in a rented house in Berkeley before they vanished, police said.
In a recent jailhouse interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jamal denied being a cult leader even though, in videos posted online that have gotten more than 200,000 views, he regularly calls himself a god, a prophet or a messiah.
Jamal, who insisted that he was an innocent man and that the molestation charges stemmed from a child custody dispute, also denied knowing the six people who vanished from the St. Louis suburb.