The long-time medical coordinator of the now-closed Agape Boarding School was behind bars Friday after his arrest on allegations of kidnapping and four sex crimes.
Scott Dumar, 46, was arrested by Bolivar police at 8:20 p.m. Thursday in southwest Missouri. He was being held in the Polk County jail, according to a booking document. No bond was listed.
The alleged crimes on the booking information are second-degree sodomy, second-degree kidnapping and three counts of second-degree sexual misconduct. There are no details of what led to the arrest.
“At this moment, I’m preparing charges,” Keaton Ashlock, Polk County prosecuting attorney, said Friday morning.
Just after noon Friday, Ashlock said the case was still “under further investigation.”
Since late 2020, Agape has been scrutinized by Missouri law enforcement, child welfare officials, lawmakers and former students. Several of those students testified in Jefferson City in 2021, urging lawmakers to do something about the years of abuse and protect the children still at the school. As a result, legislators passed a law that for the first time implemented some regulations on such schools.
Dumar is a former Agape student who as an adult became one of the top staffers at the unlicensed Christian boarding school. He was also one of five employees charged with low-level felonies in 2021, accused of physically abusing boys.
In December, Dumar pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and was placed on two years’ probation. He initially was charged with four counts of third-degree assault, a Class E felony. All charges involved former students.
Those charges alleged that between February 2020 and April 2021 Dumar knowingly caused physical injury to three boys by scrubbing their arms with rubbing alcohol and a scouring pad to remove their tattoos.
Two 18-year-olds testified in December that they bled when Dumar scrubbed off the tattoos they had given themselves with a pencil and ink, which Agape considered self-harm and a rule violation. One of them, who attended the school for four months, said a classmate gave him a cross tattoo on one of his fingers during lunch.
When Dumar removed it, the boy testified, he used the rough side of a sponge that was typically used to clean dishes and dipped it into a bin of rubbing alcohol. The teenager remembered it as “very” painful.
Dumar also was named in a civil lawsuit filed by a former student that alleged abuse at the boarding school. The suit was among many that have been settled in the past year.
In a March/April 2020 Agape newsletter, Dumar is featured and details his time at the school. He became a student of the school at age 17 when it was located in Washington state and stayed until he graduated a year later.
He said he began working at Agape in June 1995. The next year Agape moved to Stockton in Cedar County. And Dumar worked there until it closed.
In January, former director Bryan Clemensen announced he was voluntarily shutting down the school.
The closure came as the Missouri Attorney General’s Office said it planned to continue its petition for a court injunction to close the school.
“For the past 30 years Agape Boarding School has provided over 6,000 boys with an opportunity to get their life back on track and toward a bright future,” Clemensen said in a news release. “Agape has made the decision to stop providing services to the boys in its care effective January 20, 2023. Agape’s focus is on getting the boys who remain in the program safely transitioned to their parents or to foster care, other group homes or residential programs.”
Dumar worked closely with David Smock, Agape’s former longtime physician who faces 12 counts of child sex crimes in Cedar County, including multiple counts of statutory sodomy, sexual misconduct, child molestation and enticement of a child. Prosecutors with the Missouri Attorney General’s Office are leading that case, which originated in Cedar County but is now in Dade County on a change of venue.
Smock is being held without bond in the Cedar County Jail.
