Police continue search for 6 missing people tied to online cult leader who bashed Jesus
Police in Berkeley, Missouri, who have been searching for four adults and two children who went missing after they were served eviction papers for a rental home in St. Louis last August said they had ties to Rashad Jamal, an imprisoned self-styled spiritual guru, prophet and rapper with thousands of followers online.
In a recent interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, however, Jamal said he has nothing to do with the missing people.
“I am pretty sure I have never met these people,” he said. “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.”
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Since they were served with eviction papers last August, police say three St. Louis residents — Mikayla Thompson, 24, her cousin, 25-year-old Ma’Kayla Wickerson, and Wickerson’s 3-year-old daughter, Malaiyah Wickerson, as well as three others, Naaman Williams, 29, of Washington, D.C., and Gerrielle German, 27, of Horn Lake, Mississippi, and her son, Ashton Mitchell, 2 — have been missing.
And Ma'Kayla Wickerson’s mother, Cartisha Morgan, has been pleading for the public’s help in finding her daughter. Morgan, who believes her daughter is suffering from severe mental illness, told KSDK that she stopped working and ceased all communication with her family, then abruptly moved to a home on Graham Lane in north St. Louis County.
"She was probably suffering from postpartum depression. Meeting these people online, and they just preyed on her weakness," Morgan said.
Shelita Gibson, German’s mother, told the news outlet that her daughter and grandson left their hometown in Mississippi suddenly, saying they were going to Missouri with not much explanation.
"I said to her, 'You don't know where you're going. I just got a bad feeling about this. Something just doesn't sit well with my spirit. You need to rethink this. This is like you're just walking away from your whole life, that you just created. You got children, you got a significant other, like, really? What's going on?' So then she was like, 'Well, I'm leaving,'" Gibson recalled.
Gibson said German, who abandoned her 4-year-old daughter along with the rest of her family, had started behaving strangely before making her decision to leave her home. She recalled her daughter meditating on a blanket outside and citing Jamal’s teachings.
"She was saying things about high frequency, low frequency and cosmic husbands. And she was kind of acting a little weird, but I really didn't pay any attention to it at the time," Gibson explained.
Berkeley Police Major Steve Runge, who has been investigating the group’s disappearance for nearly five months, told Fox 2 that neighbors had observed the missing group’s strange behavior at the Graham Lane home before they disappeared.
“Neighbors reported seeing these people outside daily worshiping the sun,” he said. “When it was raining, they would come outside naked and run around the yard. They were digging up things in the yard.”
Runge noted that Jamal’s followers believe in polygamy, are anti-government, and he encourages them to go off the grid.
On YouTube alone where he has some 200,000 followers, Jamal promotes his teachings and music through his channel called The University of Cosmic Intelligence.
He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he grew up in Chicago, and turned to poetry and rapping to escape a world in which he was surrounded by drugs, violence and poverty. In 2017, he moved to Atlanta to pursue his music career, but he became disillusioned by the record industry.
He said after the death of George Floyd, he was inspired to become “a voice of all people who have been oppressed.”
He further explains on his website for The University of Cosmic Intelligence that it is “GEARED TOWARDS ENLIGHTENING AND ILLUMINATING THE MINDS OF THE CARBONATED BEINGS A.K.A YOUR SO CALLED BLACK & LATINO PEOPLE OF EARTH.”
Jamal calls his followers gods and goddesses and refers to himself as a god as well.
“I'm a child of almighty God and I am a god. I'm a divine messenger, black revolutionary, I came down on one mission to enlighten and inform and increase the frequency of the planet,” Jamal said in a recent broadcast on YouTube where he challenges his conviction and maintains his innocence.
Jamal was convicted last August of child molestation and cruelty to children. According to court documents cited by Vice, a Georgia judge sentenced him to 18 years in prison and an additional 22 years of probation.
Some of his followers, like Yasmine Hider and Krystal Pinkins, have reportedly also been in trouble with the law.
Hider allegedly shot motorist Adam Simjee during an August 2022 confrontation in a state park in Alabama. Pinkins reportedly watched from the woods during the shooting and then fled, leading police to what they initially described as an off-grid community living in tents in the woods. Pinkins’ 5-year-old child was also found wielding a shotgun.
Jamal insists however that big government is trying to destroy him for trying to elevate the minds of the masses.
Multiple change.org petitions with signatures from thousands of his supporters are online calling for his release.
“He is only convicted because he is ‘black’ he is only in jail because he is ‘black.’ On top of him being LIED ON. FREE RASHAD JAMAL. He is not no d**n CULT leader,” wrote supporter Kayla Islands.
“I have been divinely decreed to help raise the vibration of the collective consciousness and to help rid this planet of its parasitical invaders which are these white supremacist individuals who promote Zeus AKA [Jesus] and because of that I had to attack on many levels,” Jamal said in his defense.
Although he states that he is a messenger of God, Jamal appears to embrace in one Instagram Live broadcast, from April 6, 2022, ancestral worship and said Christianity is no different than the other religious practices demonized as magic.
He claims Christians who go to church every Sunday donate all their energy to the altar of Jesus who is in reality the Greek god Zeus.
“Remember I told you that magic was always being practiced around us? What do they have at a church y’all?” he asked his followers. “Magic was in front of you the whole time. What do they have at a church? A[n] altar. You never thought about that [did you].”
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