Tony Alamo’s voice crackled from a speakerphone as four people prepared to beat him on the evangelist’s behalf, Jeremiah Justin Miller recalled in court.
Miller said he bled after being struck 140 times with a wooden paddle. His sins: asking a science question during a history class and, without permission, wearing a metal-studded leather scarf Alamo had designed reports the Associated Press in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“He said that I was a goat among the sheep and he was going to have to beat the devil out of me,” Miller told a California courtroom three years after the 1988 incident at Alamo’s religious compound north of Los Angeles.
By 1995, prosecutors dropped child abuse charges against Alamo, who said Miller, then 11, exaggerated his tale. The evangelist, now facing federal Mann Act charges in Arkansas, said Miller was an unruly child who needed to be disciplined.
More than two decades after the beating, one man still sought by detectives surrendered last week. Miller, meanwhile, hasn’t surfaced since his family won civil suits against Alamo after the Internal Revenue Service seized the evangelist’s assets in a tax case.
“The Millers fought the fight for everybody, they paid the price for everybody. They did the work, they took the chances,” said Peter N. Georgiades, a Pittsburgh lawyer who represented the family. “They overcame their personal fears. They got the judgment and the IRS took the money.”
Miller’s case, which saw no action since 1995, sprang back to life when Douglas Christopher walked into a Santa Clarita, Calif., courthouse last week and turned himself in. Christopher, 55, faces an initial hearing Friday morning in municipal court over two felony charges from the 1988 beating, said Shiara Davila, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
The case re-emerged as Alamo, 74, faces a 10-count federal indictment accusing him of taking young girls across state lines for sex. Since a Sept. 20 raid on Alamo’s compound in Fouke, child welfare officials with the Arkansas Department of Human Services have seized 36 children associated with the evangelist’s ministries.
Read more here: 1988 abuse case involving Alamo resurfaces