Deputies raided Pastor Gary Wiggins’ religious boarding school in rural Alabama after two boys escaped to a neighbor’s house and said they were victims of abuse.
Wiggins – known as Bro. Gary to those at the school – ran the Blessed Hope Boys Academy in Seminole, Ala. The private school was billed as a place where parents could send troubled teens for hard work and a Christian education.
It operated without government regulation or inspection, thanks to an exemption in state law for schools that consider themselves part of a church ministry.
Five months after the police raid, Alabama passed a law that would allow the state to inspect schools like his. Wiggins shuttered the Blessed Hope Boys Academy.
But he soon reopened in a remote area of Missouri where there are no such regulations, no prying eyes from the state.