Five new lawsuits have been filed alleging abuse at Agape Boarding School in southwest Missouri, where five staffers face criminal charges for assaulting students.
The lawsuits, which accuse the school of emotional and physical abuse, bring the total number of cases filed against Agape to 19 in the past 16 months.
The civil suits were filed Wednesday in Vernon County Circuit Court by former students from California, Florida, Texas and Mississippi whose time at the Stockton school spanned from 2014 through April of this year. They accuse Agape Boarding School and Agape Baptist Church, which oversees the school, of negligence, infliction of emotional distress and battery by staff and fellow students. Some of the abuse, the suits allege, involved torture and starvation.
